I've never seen the appeal of couch co-op gaming myself.
Honestly, it's difficult for me to conceive of that. Most of my best memories of playing video games throughout my entire life are of 2-3, sometimes four knuckleheads sitting on a couch shit-talking eachother in versus modes or trying to figure something out in co-op. Fucking around in The Forge in Halo 3 with friends and building dumb shit, playing co-op through RE5 with a friend, splitscreen co-op COD in the same lobby [on the same account too, that shit doesn't happen nowadays lmao], playing console Sims titles and bugging the fuck out of my cousin or arguing over how to build the house, the early WWE games where we'd make a huge roster of deranged and deformed freaks to fight in the Royal Rumble including the Slim Jim guy and the Hulk and a bunch of dudes who looked like anime characters, getting our asses kicked in the Conflict games, Rainbow Six, SOCOM, etc. Even as late as my twenties, drunk Super Smash Brothers or Goldeneye was a guaranteed good time. LAN parties had a similar vibe although of course you weren't playing on the same console and they took a whole lot more effort to arrange because this was back when PCs were big chunky, cumbersome beige boxes you had to haul back and forth and they were so power-hungry that you'd throw the circuit breaker on occasion if your buddy's basement wasn't up to providing the juice and the room would genuinely get like ten degrees hotter, not to mention they tended to be finicky and less "plug and play" than modern machines.
It also provided a good bonding experience for families, I remember playing fighting games or wrestling games with my dad very fondly when we weren't taking turns trying to beat Resident Evil games. I even managed to get my mom into Guitar Hero for a little while. Now it seems like just about the only way you can get that kind of experience is with older games or playing dedicated party games, which basically the only good ones now are made by Nintendo so if you don't have a Nintendo console, get fucked I guess. The Wii in retrospect was gimmicky as fuck but it was pretty cool to get a group of family/friends together and play Wii Sports golf or bowling.
Unfortunately couch co-op is more or less dead now, LAN parties could still be a thing but they're pretty rare unless you run in an enthusiast circle. Even taking turns on a single player game was pretty fun most of the time, you could talk shit on your friend for sucking ass at the game, though one facsimile of that is streaming gameplay via Discord or something but it just isn't the same. Shitty part is that as you age, you don't know if things were really that good or if you're just looking back at it through rose-tinted glasses and if you tried to replicate it now, you might realize it was just lightning in a bottle and it was the people around you that made it entertaining and novel. Those memories definitely occupy the same space in my mind as getting together with friends to ride bikes around the parking lot or organizing a game of backyard football for sure.
But everyone has their preferences, I ain't knocking it, just saying that couch co-op was responsible for a hell of a lot of good memories and it's a shame that very few developers put much time or many resources into giving people good offline multiplayer options or modes anymore. I'm like 95% sure that most of the popular FPS games now [COD, Battlefield, Fortnite, etc] have no way for two players to do anything but a handful of co-op missions, maybe a versus mode. Like you used to be able to play COD or Halo fully online with a friend using the same account, same subscription, same TV. All you needed was a second controller. I don't know of a new release FPS that allows you to do that, maybe I'm wrong on some of them. Some "indie" titles have local multiplayer still but there's only so much pixel-art shlock you can realistically play.
TL;DR - the death of couch co-op/local multiplayer sucks and it's depressing, it created a lot of great social experiences for a shit-ton of people and offered an opportunity for family to bond with one another, now it's pretty much gone.
