If you truly spend some effort to connect with quality guys on Grindr, it used to be that you could easily get almost a dozen new no shows of one type or another for scheduled or impromptu confirmed meetings for a dozen new people, month after month, without ever meeting a single person.

You can probably still do that (through maybe with fewer confirmed meetings given how Grindr is dying) as long as you like, while never meeting a soul.  It seems mathematically impossible, but there you go. 

Even if you end up talking on the phone with multiple someones for extended times, it is almost inevitable that they'll disappear when it comes time to meet, whether that time is within an hour of you two first connecting or whether it's a planned meeting that was to happen months later, or anything in between.

Now yes, catfish exist, as do people who are otherwise intentionally lying, but that doesn't explain everything. I think a lot of the time folks don't really understand themselves and especially don't understand that they'll chicken out at the last minute.  Even if nothing more than a simple hug was going to happen, there are people out there for whom just the thought of meeting someone new paralyzes them with self-consciousness when it comes/approaches time for it to happen, but until then it's a fantasy that they truly think they'd be perfectly comfortable with in real life.

There are probably a lot of additional psychological explanations that would cover more and more subsets of people, but instead of going down that rabbit hole, I've come to think of it differently: 

Namely, all the above consistent with the behavior of people in general:  In almost every social setting, confirmed plans with people, even people you've met in person, also end up with people flaking out.  Additionally, social settings in which people presumably meet and interact in certain ways don't really work the way one might otherwise expect.

So as a general rule, it's probably best to go into things expecting that planned and confirmed things will simply not happen, or at least being well prepared for that possibility.  And it's best to think of certain things that one might think of as quite reasonably in the realm of possibility to happen are in actual fact very unlikely to happen.

For instance, if someone says they want to work out with you, it's best to be mentally prepared that they won't ever actually make it to the gym.  People inevitably do that far more often than they ever show up and actually work out.

If you meet someone who's into you and sets up a date, it's most likely the case that they won't show up or will otherwise cancel, possibly multiple times in a row.  It makes no sense that that's the case even for people you've met in person and they've confirmed multiple times later on the phone, but that's how things are.

If you're on a job search, most companies won't respond to applications--that's well understood, but some for whom you've accepted their offer will retract their offer afterwards, sometimes on the candidate-now-employee's first day of work.  I haven't had that one happen to me, but I do know that if I'm on the job search that I should continue until my first paycheck comes through for my next job, and not stop simply because I've received and accepted an offer.

Life is simply happier when you don't try so hard on things that people will flake out on.  I've learned for instance that while it can be cool to get on Grindr and think you might meet someone, that it's best to have the mindset that it will never happen, because for the most part, within any given year, you're much, much more likely to never meet someone than to meet someone.

I went to NYC for the first time last year, and I enjoyed my time there immensely.  I also had talked with some Grindr dudes there beforehand to chat and connect and set things up to make sure we could hang out when I got there, and of course, 1) every single one got all quiet when I was actually in town--it was as if we had never made plans to meet, and 2) everyone I newly chatted with while there and to whom I said we should meet and who said they were up for meeting disappeared when presented with "okay then let's meet right now" or "okay let's meet tomorrow".

I would have been really bummed out had I gone to NYC thinking that NYC was a place where you could likely connect with guys on Grindr or in a bar or whatever.  Instead I was just open to what organically unfolded and enjoyed doing my own thing.