As a hiring manager, it’s still the best place to try and find people for a given role.

Especially when it comes to somewhat more specific skills like graphics development.

Do you have advice for building up this network for graphics development? I'm a Master's student building a custom rendering stack with wgpu and it's difficult to meet people interested in specific skills like rendering.

If you’re in a big city, there are likely meetups locally for game devs (usually amateurs but a few professionals show up)

If you aren’t in a location with meetups , the best bet is finding online game dev communities.