I have learned through many years and many tears that it is better to find people who want to play RPGs and make friends with them than it is to try to make your friends play RPGs.

RPGs are a bigger commitment than many people realize. It's more like joining a sports team than playing a board game. Most of them require you to show up several times a month, learn some rules, and remember what happened last time. That's too much for some people, but your friends are more likely to over extend themselves because they want to be nice to you. So you get the perennial scheduling problems. It should surprise no one that people who didn't go out of their way to find the game are less reliable than people who did.

So my greatest successes have been playing with strangers who became friends. One pandemic crew were from a band's fan discord. One was put together from the reddit /lfg post. Another was from a fan discord for the specific game I wanted to play.

It also doesn't help that D&D is so mega popular it sucks the air out of the room for everyone else. For a long time I wanted to play Fate, but I couldn't find players and trying to convert D&D players was an uphill battle. I would go directly to a fate fan site or discord if I wanted to do a game of it now.