I loved them, I miss them dearly, but no, I don't think they'll come back.
A lot has changed and the internet is not the same, for better and for worse. For one, it's just a lot bigger. You'd think that'd make it easier, but it seems to make it harder. There's too much noise for the communities to stand out, so what usually happens is one or two get huge and the others dwindle and die. Even just look at Lemmy, through no fault of your own, Beehaw is becoming one of the largest instances and it requires active work to spread the weight across the rest of the federation. People gravitate I guess.
Plus, because it's so much bigger, there's less of an identity in the spaces that do survive. Post in any reddit thread, then go to another. Chances are nobody'll be the same (except for a few superusers) so there's no real sense of belonging or community that the old forums had. Back then you trolled your friends, not strangers.
I had a uni lecturer pronounce MySQL as "my squirrel"