Strongly disagree. It's not a scaling issue.

1:1's don't renew. You have to keep feeding the relationship. The relationship can be extremely rewarding for chit chat & conversation, but it could drop at any point, and become a memory. It has no self-maintaining spirit, no ability to repair itself if one person loses some availability or time.

A group can fend for itself in a far different way. Assemblages can have members come and go, but maintain a core purpose and identity. There's rhizomatic affiliations that can find each other & get new currents & excitements going, whereas in 1:1's the potentials for connection are bounded.

Closed systems can only keep processing the same pieces of energy again and again for so long. They can steal some vitality from the surrounding, but the lifetime of the relationship is limited. You need more open dynamical systems if you want to keep interesting things going. Long term survival requires systems that can perpetuate & share themselves. 1:1's by definition cannot.

I don't think we disagree, my point would be that you need both. But if you rely on 1:1 only you're either quickly going to lose friends or spend all your time in 1:1 (or not make new friends at all, as you can't make new friends in 1:1)

This is me, I spend all my time on 1:1 and I have a small but very close set of friends, and no desire to make any more.

It's like a romantic relationship - once you find "that person", you're done.

True friends do not need feeding, you can go a year without seeing each other and catch up and be right back to where you were before. And most of my 1:1 friends, I talk to regularly anyway because I want to. I've known these people for decades. So your comment about closed systems doesn't ring true to me at all.

This really doesn’t sound like a healthy ideal to me, and if I remember correctly there was this paper that would detect elevated risk of suicides by analyzing social graphs and finding nodes that weren’t part of any cliques. So that should imply that this is not good for anyone.

What percentage of those people want more friends or friendship time than they have access to? What percentage have a mental illness like depression or anxiety, or alcoholism that would cause them to spend more time alone?

I'm open to the idea that my suicide risk is higher by not having a large group support network, but I enjoy being alone and I enjoy 1:1 time enormously more than being in groups, and overall I think my quality of life is higher with this choice. Everyone is different of course.