1000x the bolded #3 below. And not only that, be looking around with the RX and keep the antennas moving.
But that is not what happens within or outside of contests, or even during good band openings, and has not for some time now - even before the digital modes growth in popularity. Instead what many analog only ops do is wait for the phone call / text, wait for the Internet propagation aid to show some activity, sit on ON4KST, or maybe some QSO Slack channel etc. Only then to try and make a QSO AFTER they had already scheduled it. To me that is as boring as it gets. What's the fun of making a contact with someone where you already know who they are, where they are, and when they are (on) before any RF goes anywhere? Once you know all those things, there IS NO CHALLENGE left.
Meanwhile on FT8 etc you play your hunches that the band might be open in a particular direction (just like in the good old days). Point antennas in that direction, and there's a good chance of finding some DX calling CQ, and they are doing so repeatedly. For perhaps 10's of minutes worth of 15 second sequences. And you too can do the same thing. And therefore be making QSO's. Meanwhile the analog calling frequencies - crickets. Even jumping over to the SSB calling frequency and making CQ's of your own, - still crickets.
So the decline of people just tuning and around and/or calling CQ on analog modes precedes the rise in digital mode use by years. It seems to have actually coincided with the availability of DC-daylight radios, the rise propagation loggers, and more recently QSO chat pages and the like. And then the allowance of self-spotting / real-time scheduling in contests has only worsened things.