I think this sets up a bit of a false opposition of concepts; the opposition need not be between real life relationships with "actual, real people" and the faceless people whom one meets through endless Internet arguments - the opposition is much more abstract, between people who one only encounters in the latter capacity and who one only encounters in the former capacity. As in, the type of interactions one has are the differentiating factor here, not the medium over which they are conducted.

Almost anyone with history of using the Internet in a psedonymous capacity can attest to this fact - remote relationships one builds can be very strong and fruitful, surpassing even one's most intimate "IRL" connections, and real life relationships can be weak, obscured, superficial, and lonely. In my experience most people operate thinking that online relationships (and even all interactions) can only be adversarial and abstracted from the real people behind them (e.g. a battle of ideas) but I think there's a lot to be found in positive human interactions online.

Taking this further, I think the idea you espouse has the potential to be dangerous and alienating - it denies certain modes of interaction that some people are not only comfortable with but satisfied with. In denying this capability, you not only shut yourself off from this potential, but you alienate people who find it most fruitful to explore this potential.

This opposition comes up a lot - many people simply cannot understand how one can build a meaningful mostly-anonymous relationship online, or they cannot understand how one can build a sex life in the comfort of their room. They view it as a kind of degraded way of having a relationship or sexuality, "not the real thing", a mere substitute, that the person must be sad or lonely to be finding such enjoyment, to be deprived in order to seek it out, and unsatisfied to pursue it.

It calls back the idea that the masturbator (or the contented asexual) can't be satisfied, since she's not experiencing the joy of sex - she's living in a sad, lonely, isolated and lower-tier way. It calls back the idea of the anime/comic book/sci-fi fan who can't be satisfied with their pleasures (or worse, that they are stuck in a childish imaginative state) because "it's not real/they're just comics/they're pixels on a screen". It calls back the idea of those who enjoy atonal music being either posers or fundamentally broken because they enjoy it more than classical period (or pop) music. It calls back the idea of asking why people would want to listen to music sung in languages they don't understand. It even calls back the idea that philosophy and abstract math are useless because they don't solve any real world problems. In its most egregious form, it calls back the idea that one can't enjoy a good story in a book because it's not visual/auditory and therefore can't appeal to us in the same way a movie can. Why read the Harry Potter books when you can just watch the films, right?

With all due respect, I cannot express how much I detest this concept. It only comes from narrow-mindedness and pre-established ideas. The concept figures that because I can't see the value, the value can't exist for anyone else. Nobody else could experience the world differently. Ironically, it displays a lack of empathy - something, as conventional wisdom would have it, can only come about through real life interactions.

To be clear, I'm not saying you adhere to the general 'conception' I've criticised here, but I am saying that your point fits very nicely into this ultimately harmful conception. I realize the irony of having this kind of argument online.