That's a big reach imho. Geordi interacts with all of them at Poker routinely. He's befriended plenty of people. I will concede that he was shown to have social struggles with romance & occasionally with misunderstandings, like Scotty, and maybe a couple others IIRC
But he commands a team in engineering on the flagship, & seemingly rather well. He mentors both Barclay (who does seem to suffer from a social condition) and also Sonya Gomez. He normally gets on very well with Riker & Wesley. He singlehandedly sorts out dealing with a hostile Romulan in The Enemy, by showing exceptional social capability. For heaven's sake, in The Minds Eye, he's off to vacation on RISA
Hell, he's so approachable & friendly, that in Disaster bloody Beverly is trying to rope him into playing the Major General in Pirates of Penzance lol, and he actually tries it a bit!
BTW, we may overlook it, due to its brevity, but Geordi LaForge is the best man at Miles O'Brien's wedding! He's not perfect, but he's certainly not autistic or socially stunted by any pathological metric IMHO. He looks to be very well integrated into that social circle.
I think there's a lot to unpick here. Firstly that deeply introverted people can fake it. I think I've heard that people are neurodivergent can 'pass' or 'mask', but that doesn't mean they're not struggling.
I think also possible to be socially connected yet deeply lonely. It's something I've struggled with at points. You can go down a list of things you do and people you know, but it may not solve a deep need for a social connection you're not getting.
Geordi may do well at dealing with men and machines, but with women then it may get harder for him. And of course the writers played that up.
It's also easy to get things wrong. I think I'm pretty grown up and understand people then I'll do something that'll upset someone as i didn't see it coming. So as adults we can get things wrong despite on the surface being reasonably competent.
Did he lie though? No one can really tell what was in his mind. I see someone who was after connection, with someone he respected through a fake prism of a holodeck episode. Was there a crush, some love in there? Most likely. But I think it's also slippery slope when two senior staff members can't have dinner together. We see it many times in Trek.
I'm not defending Geordi completely... or more specifically how the writers wrote him to be creepy. But I do challenge that he had malice, or is a pretty much borderline rapist how it's portrayed sometimes. I see a sort of infatuation from someone who actually has less social skills than it may seem at points, and written in a way that played up the cringe-worthy moments for drama. And as they have 40 minutes it moves fast vs something where it could have been explored slower on an arc-driven show.
Also on a related note, I think the whole use of holodeck with real people seems worse today. Barclay was played for laughs despite being far worse. The Geordi situation was largely written him as being awkward. I think it feels worse today because we are in a world where people are being deep faked and used in AI - and of course women are getting the brunt of it, as we seems to do as a society. It feels a lot more real today than the writers were giving it at the time where it was largely played as harmless and japery.
