As someone who just graduated college, I have spent the last year learning what lots of people on here probably already know: if you can't get a job/education lined up, society (especially in the US) will do everything it can to make you feel like a pathetic failure. I applied for PhD positions and got in nowhere because academia in the US is unbelievably cooked (a whole other rant). Anecdotal evidence says that schools were accepting literally ~5 people out of an applicant pool of ~300 because of funding cuts, and the situation before funding cuts wasn't much better. But anyways, not getting into a PhD position is very far from the end of the world; I can just take a gap year and reapply.
However, I feel like my experience and the experiences of those around me (both of rejection and success) have really reinforced just how "connections" seem to be damn near the only thing that can get you a position at this point. I already knew how important connections were in the job search; I've heard all the sayings like "your network is your net worth" and "it's not about what you know, it's about who you know." That shit sucks. But I naïvely thought that somehow academics would be more insulated from this type of stuff. I knew that PhD applications were personal affairs on some level; you're applying to work with someone more than you're applying to a school as a whole. But people around me would talk about how they would talk to potential advisors at conferences and get lunch with their current research advisors. It felt like there was a social aspect to being in academia that I didn't know you had to participate in and that I just kinda didn't grasp. I like my advisors, but I usually kept my relationship with them to research and I have no idea how I'm supposed to get to know them better so they can write better rec letters for me and blah blah blah. I don't know if I'm over-analyzing my rejections (given that acceptance rates are literally 2%) but it feels like the fact that I didn't go out of my way to "network" hurt my chances. Anyways I now get another chance to apply to either an absolutely cooked higher education system or an absolutely cooked job market 
tl;dr: complaining about how I graduated college and didn't get into any PhD programs and do not have a job rn and I think the fact that I have a hard time "making connections" and "networking" probably hurt my chances
as someone prone to introversion, i love not going to social functions.
basically, my professional success is due to the fact that i found something to be obsessive/fanatical about.
i always want to talk about or hear about a certain topic and its related fields, and i will talk about it with anyone for as long as they want. that means i never turn off and continue reading/communicating/marinating on this shit. it drove my friends-from-before absolutely bonkers. they did not care and would get annoyed when i spent a whole gathering talking to the one other person who showed that was interested.
this discovery didn't happen until my late 20s and at that point i was a college drop out, so after some idealistic self-exploitation for a few years in the field learning hands on, i went back to school for it and it was completely different than my first time. i didn't care about going to social events unless they were with people in the same orbit of the discipline or potentially had a lens of critical thinking about it. dork confabs, student organizations, symposia, sign me up. i would spend all day on campus going to shit and slithering into conferences. i met other people like me with the same problem and they became my people.
the thing is, there's a functionality to it: nobody can know everything despite their best effort. being able to connect with a lot of people means you have a wide pool of people to ask when you want to bounce an idea around or just get a gut check from someone you trust. the people i met who are similarly afflicted love a rando question out of the blue after months of silence, even though we now live hundreds of miles apart and they have kids and are dealing with a divorce or whatever.
the only effort it takes to maintain these relationships is that they know when they reach out with their own left-field b.s., i will be super into it. i won't gatekeep, i'll be honest about gaps in knowledge and when i'm speculating.
there was a moment when it seemed like "the internet" could replace this, and it is still the first stop for any of us. but we're seeing how rapidly it is becoming filled with slop, hallucinations, and just plain unreliable bullshitting. the academic papers are often paywalled and are too deep/specific to certain conditions so we still need each other to cut through the noise and point out the footholds and dead ends.
when i went back for my undergrad and later for grad school, i understood plainly that as critical as the knowledge i could gain would be and as excited as i was to receive it, that wasn't what i was there for. anyone with an internet connection and time could become highly knowledgeable about almost anything. i was there for the social capital of the credential and the affiliation/community of my cohort and the connections facilitated by my institutional affiliation. school is as much about being inducted into the shared language as it is about the knowledge of the discipline.
anyway, all this to say, i think the only way networking becomes less of a chore is if you look for and pursue knowledge of the things that ignited your interest. in that way, networking becomes an additional source of knowledge. the academy itself is a total shitshow and its super easy to get through it without building a professional network, but the infrastructure is there to build something potentially massive and far reaching. the other thing is, network building is cumulative. at first you know nobody or only have a few weak connections and it sucks, but as you find others and become known as a generally agreeable but passionate person, those connections build on each other and interweave until it takes less and less effort to keep it growing.
so if you end up going into the academy again, surrender to your innermost nerd. also, if there are international students in your field to meet, they can be awesome to connect with. they are always at the conferences. many have so deeply embraced their academic interest, they've come across the world to a weird-ass culture. that is a hardcore nerd move. likely the research discipline and jargon will be the only thing you have in common. the ones i met had these incredible experiences and very novel (to me) interests/perspective in the field, yet they were mostly isolated from the campus community, sadly. if you make a cool friend, that has the potential to open your professional development network to a completely different geographic context. major game changer.
Literally me, but with math.