I think the real question might be: Why is the environment on this forum more appealing than others?
I think I can answer that and this is purely my own anecdotal experience and what I've heard from others.
This forum attracts a fairly specialised group of people, compared to the general population. People here generally seem to be more intelligent, coherent and more open to differing ideas than others. It's certainly not the type of forum where bored housewives come to bitch about things or people with huge egos come to troll. I've seen forums such as the Australian Whirlpool forum spiral out of control, it used to be dedicated to just telco and now, you can discuss all manner of topics there from people losing their driving licences to consumer law and everything in between. It has become a shit-show of over moderation and people basically arguing with each other. Basically, Whirlpool (or Whingepool as it's commonly known) has basically reached the point where if a moderator takes issue with you personally or disagrees with your opinion, they just delete your posts. Their forum rules alone spans pages and pages yet are inconsistently applied depending on which moderator you get and which way the wind is blowing, it's not conducive to a nice environment.
To quote figures, they have almost 900k members and over 40 active moderators. EEVblog has almost 53k members and 2 active moderators. Yet very few posts that are not spam get removed and I'd like to think people are generally quite content here.
The idea of the off-topic section was mine (I wanted a section dedicated to cooking as it's one of the topics often discussed in the EEVblog IRC channel). But it's not designed to attract non-EE people to the forum, rather to complement the hobbies and interests of those who are primarily interested in tech/EE/computing but also have other interests. Some people like being members of discreet forums and that's fine, I personally don't.
One of the things I liked about this forum is that it was possible to discuss moderation decisions with other members, unlike Whirlpool, where moderation seems to be done almost at the whim of the moderator, so that one favoured poster gets to go "off topic", post a lot of twaddle & be untouched, but an answer refuting that posting, offering proof of the points made, will be hidden as "off topic".
An even worse example is the sports forum " The Roar", where a posting not in accordance with the favoured narrative never appears at all.
At least Whirlpool has their fairly useless "Talk with a moderator" system,which is clunky as hell to use.
Imagine my surprise, then, this morning, when looking through "Show new replies to your posts" to find that, although the Moderation thread came up complete, there was no "quote" or "reply" option, only a stupid "thanks" option.
"Weird", thought I , & resolved to look for the thread using the main index.
When I found it, I was surprised to see no postings later than November 2020, & no explanation as to why.
Please don't go down the Whirlpool route, keep us informed!