I've never understood the appeal of the opposite. Modern gaming where you just play with different randos every round.
When I was a kid playing Quake 3 I had different servers bookmarked, knew the players that ran the servers and the general crowd that hung around. Had friendships and rivalries.
Modern multiplayer you may as well be playing bots. There's no community.
Xonotic has that old school feeling. It's an unfortunately tiny player base, and only a handful of servers with regular players. But if you are within ping of a busy server (like Jeff & Julius resurrection) you do run into the same people all the time, including the ones that run the servers.