A good chunk of the social events I attend are coordinated mainly through very busy group chats, and then announced with Instagram stories (yes really, even though they disappear after 24 hours). I'm not really in a position to change that either, so I'd rather get the 1 update from Instagram than sift through hundreds of group chat messages.

I agree with you in principle, though. There are better tools for all of this that they just won't use.

I occasionally feel like I miss out on impersonal events that do only get announced that way, and I definitely miss out on a bunch of group chat events, but personally I guess I just feel like that's ok, and if I was meant to be there someone would have hit me up. There are exceptions, like recently having attended a wedding (very personal) with a specific group of close contacts, but I received the invitation personally. There are some people that I've lost regular contact with or didn't form friendships with on the basis that they relied entirely on group chat to organize things, which I just refuse to participate in, and that's not for everyone. If nobody can be bothered to contact me, then I can't be bothered to show up. That said, if I was trying to monitor meetup groups or raves or something, I'd probably just do what you're doing.