For me, the bonding comes more from shared experiences than shared tastes in pop culture. By shared experiences, I mean like if we live in the same city getting stuck in traffic in the same highway or if we both have a deadbeat dad and were raised by our mom. I guess sports have the most potential because it isn't as passively consumed as other parts of pop culture, especially if you go to stadiums to watch it live and play the sport casually with other people. If we're talking about videogames, there's a difference between playing couch co-op Smash with other people and saying, "BG3 and DE are my favorite games. I can see it's also your favorite game as well." I've encountered the second in the wild, some dude who had the same exact taste in games as me. It also did fuck all to actually develop a friendship because talking about videogames doesn't mean much except talking about videogames. We might have the same tastes in games, but we didn't share the same experience of playing those games together.