That said, I play and enjoy a lot of games. Many of them are more social and lighter, and all are more directly competitive/interactive. It sounds like, while of course board games just may not be for you, it's also possible your tastes didn't match with the group you were with.
That said a lot of people tend to like games with no direct competition. These are derisively called "multiplayer solitaire", and a few times I've played some games like this by mistake and been mystified as to what's interesting about them. Recently, partly due to the pandemic, the "roll-and-write" genre, which is basically all like this, has been experiencing a burst of popularity. So a lot of people seem to enjoy it.
It's not as solitary, but Gloomhaven, the number one ranked game on BoardGameGeek, is a very expensive game with a typical session taking four hours, and by the admission of its fans a large chunk of the gameplay time is setup, teardown, and bookkeeping. I played it once and I can't imagine what anyone sees in it, but there's demand so more games like it end up on Kickstarter or whatever.
It's frustrating to see something I can't enjoy at all be the top of the industry in some ways, but the nice thing about games is they're quite diverse, so it's not that hard to find something more to my taste. I just have to keep in mind that some people have very difference preferences and that's not always communicated clearly.