Route

"Fishing with nets," as Siv notes, is a useless piece of crap. It's quite logical that it doesn't yield any results.
I don't know how it is for most people, but in my opinion, it all starts with ordinary friendship and a desire to communicate, which is reinforced by a natural attraction to each other (I doubt the likelihood of attraction to a person whose appearance is, to put it mildly, repulsive). Otherwise, people are simply interested in communicating with each other; they should be united by some common interests, and only then does it gradually turn into flirting and everything that follows.

Now, it's all about a woman evaluating everything and giving advice to a man based on that.
Nets, Revan, use them.

It seems like you're having a debate here.
The truth, as always, lies in the middle. There are people who got married through "friendship" (I know some), and there are those who successfully "caught" someone with "nets" and live happily (I personally know at least two such couples). And then there are those who just stay hikikomori, as usual. There is obviously no universal advice.
What can be said about "friendship" is that if there are relevant circles of active communication, and many people of the opposite sex are part of these circles, then this option is probably the best. If this is not the case, then the advice to "just gradually become friends with someone, spontaneously" is as useless as possible. That's the way it is.