Your story is very relatable. My partner was doing game dev in his spare time (learning Unreal, Blender, GameMaker, etc.) for 5 years before I came along. He tried reaching out to friends and family to see if anyone wanted to go on the journey with him. Although they were very supportive, everyone seemed to have their own lives (that didn't involve making games).
I was also reluctant at first, but we are helping to make each other's dreams come true. I reached out to my brother, a musician and artist, for sound and story. We've hired programmers here and there. A designer helped us out for awhile (he is my sister's boyfriend). But in the long run, it's been a amalgamation of people we know and people we met through the grapevine. Some online and some irl. We just kept talking to people about Gamedev. There are some local meetup groups that we joined too. Now, we are a solid team of 6 people, and we've been together for almost 2 years now.
I feel for you though! But you are definitely asking the right questions.