The biggest problem with modern dating is everyone overestimating their own market value. You are not "settling" when you end up with someone just as bland and worthless as yourself.
That's definitely
a problem, but I doubt it's the biggest. In fact, it's pretty difficult to talk about what the biggest problem is.
At the root, men and women alike don't know how to love/respect, which also means that they don't know how to become lovable/respectable people. But then, there's also the matter of a lot of our understanding about love being the result of (among other things) Disney, formulaic romcoms/chick flicks, and
porn-- it's through the first two especially that women are taught that they can have it all without compromise and perseverance, that there's no substantial sacrifice they need to make for a relationship. The worst part about this is that they're largely correct, since a man's scarcity mindset allows even the lowest quality of woman to find intimacy.
I reckon that feminism, especially from the second wave onwards, decimated the self-awareness of women regarding their natural inclinations towards particular types of mates, so women are taught to signal preferences they don't actually have, which misinforms men on what is practically valued in interpersonal relationships (e.g. in truth, sentimentality isn't valued nearly as much as being able to provide and bust heads when necessary; sweetness isn't valued at all, and might be an altogether juvenile trait; being innately "nice" only enables you to be taken advantage of by everyone around you, and pretending to be nice highlights even greater impotence). The liberalization and commodification of sex has devalued the act and made it easier to obtain in a relationship, reducing the participants of many of them to fleshy mutual masturbation tools. Furthermore, the emphasis on sex in much of our society made it so that you're some kind of loser for not having had sex.
Meanwhile, the only male subculture of prominence is presently largely manned by men in indefinite "red pill rage", so they're not helping many people become lovable men.
There's a lot of angles to this matter, which is why this article irritated me gravely. It's a know-nothing article written by a know-nothing who, by her own admission, stumbled through relationships for an entire decade but for some reason feels qualified to write anything grander than her strategy for ingesting Pepto-Bismol. And here she is, talking about how to find Mr./Ms. Perfect (or a 50/50 bisexual down for threesomes) in this massively vapid meander of an article.