There’s a reason sites like Reddit sprang up and grew huge despite forums having already existed.

Yeah, but it comes with many major downsides that have become more apparent in recent years. For example, even lemmy seems to get hit hard by astroturfing, misinformation, disinformation, and toxicity. That's more rare and easier to prevent on forums I think.

It’ll expose more people to the topic though.

Yeah, I was considering using lemmy instead of creating a forum, but decided on the latter after weighing the pros and cons.