I've found YOUTUBE STUDIO to be quite handy to respond to any comments.
I always check the 'notifications' bell button for new comments, I respond to them, and just delete the respective notification to make sure all of them have been answered. I've been doing this since I started with my channel.
Diving into the comment section is a HUGE effort, but not only rewarding to be chatting with your subs community, but also shows them you value them as they're taking the time to physically write a comment. So, the least you can do it acknowledge / respond!
Matter of keeping the SOCIAL in SOCIAL MEDIA standard high - I've used that same thinking in growing my Instagram account to the size it is now...
I don't disagree with you, but that is just the problem. YouTube is not and never has been Social Media. YT is a video content search engine and service. No one goes to YT to be Social and have a conversation and interact with each other. No one! 70% of people go to YT for information. No one goes to YT for social interaction. Even now, YT's efforts to convert it into a social media platform are poorly implemented at best and downright laughable at worst.
Regardless, I respond to every single comment. I even had a commenter notice this just the other day ("Wow! You actually respond to every single comment.") It is rare amongst Tubers, though. I know that maybe one comment out of aten that I make on other people's channels ever gets a response. The thing is, the worst people at responding are the bigger channels. So, it appears that while YT acts like you responding to comments is crack cocaine to soothe their addiction, YT does not reward channels that do this, or punish channels that do not. They just like to irritate you into doing it. So, again YT is demanding you do something for them, without them giving you any benefit for the extra effort.
Here lately, I have been getting a lot of Super Thanks gifts. Two to three a week. It feels nice, but at the end of the day, the whole Super Thanks system is crap and does not work. For starters, YT steals 30% of your tip. So people want to give you the creator money and YT dips their hand in a takes 30% of the tip that was meant for you. Then, they do not have a separate system to pay you this tip. It just gets lumped into your Adsense payment and they provide no detail into how much you got. So, you actually do not know if you are getting any of it. On top of all this, even though I have got about 30 Tips in the last couple of months, Analytics is only showing two of them. I honestly cannot find evidence that I have gotten a dime of the about $200 in tips that people have given me through Super Thanks. It is just another example of a half-baked poorly implemented program that YT cooked up to make creators think that YT is doing something for them.