I had a wonderful experience too, my parents really put their heart and soul into me and my siblings and we had a local homeschooling group larger than one of the nearby schools that did minimum weekly outings and the like.
I’m an electrical engineer now, my sisters are lawyers, bankers, and concert pianists, my brothers are studying for medical doctorate and running a forge, and many of my friends are in similar places.
Just to add my voice to yours, it’s absolutely all about what you put into it. I have deep lifelong friendships from my homeschooling days, the heavy intent our parents had on the social aspect was imperative. I joined after school activities by the local high-schools later on and met some great public school friends.
The natural flow of learning time-wise vs the rigidity of public school is a studied and proven to be far more conducive to education, as well, and I wish public schools would learn this.
Mine and my siblings’ and friends’ experience was amazing compared to most if not all of my public school friends, and it was all thanks to our parents pouring their lives into giving us all of the knowledge and environments we needed. It can definitely not go this way, if the parent isn’t actively providing those environments, but it is and always will be an issue of the tool being used incorrectly.
Aw that’s so rough on the poor guy, it likely did him a world of good moving forward that he had friends like you to open his eyes, even if it was a short time.
I had the reverse happen where I was teaching the public school kids that you could climb trees. I’m sure it wasn’t mindblowing for them, but they had just never thought about it before. We were like 13 at the time.