but those all want to see my instagram

If they want your instagram, they want to see your social status (number of followers or whatever). Good photos help of course.

At best they want to see your lifestyle.

This is not all women. But it is the "all women" that you're talking to.

My absolute top recommendation: don't do "share my insta". It's phone number or "no thanks".

I do tons of fun stuff however I hardly ever get good pictures from these events.

You can change that. Get people to help, get a spare camera to hand to people, that sort of thing. That's a small investment and a lot of fun to have a communal "event pics" camera that people can hand around without worrying about their phone. Hand it to a different person every week, "get some pics of me for my insta".

I'm not that photogenic either.

How tall? Bodyfat percentage? Hairstyle?

My last two phones got stolen so I can't even post all the travels I did. On top of that my friends only seem to take/share pictures in which they look better.

Everyone does this

And there are huge holes in the timeline from the ex-era.

Use AI to remove her.

Face to face I got much better game then most of em but they are better at social media and seem to even secretly like the fact that I'm so bad at it?

Of course they do, noone likes competition.

Hate this shit at 38 but it seems more and more necessary. Do I delete it all and start from 0? I don't have a time machine to fix the last 7 years of missing content. I honestly don't know where to start. Ongoing pinned stories of what? Remove tagged shit from friends? Feeling like a boomer here.

Ok.

Look, simple answer is this: forget that shit. It's an addiction, has massive competition, and gets very very slim results if you're not top 0.1% on insta.

Your target demographic (presumably women 28-35) aren't completely corrupted, at least not yet.

Apps (Tinder etc) require only 4 photos. Those photos have to be amazing, but you are in control of that.

Insta probably requires years of hard work.

Real life: you do better real life, so find ways that you can capitalise on that. You can swap insta with women so you're clearly talking to them - if they won't share phone number then just say "I don't do insta, I like real life", and try again to take her number.

There's also a good chance that the "insta dodge" they are doing is due to disinterest or not being single. That's fine, but treat it as a soft "no thanks", and not "I must be insta god".

I haven't used social media (besides anonymous platforms such as this one) in several years, and I was married by the time social media really took off, so I don't have much to say about that besides to paraphrase what Vermy already said: try to capture the occasional candid moment rather than becoming a performative poser.

I will take this opportunity to address a pet peeve:

feeling like a boomer

"Boomer" isn't a generic term for "old person". It means someone born during the post-WW2 baby boom between 1946 and 1960 (some people extend this to 1962 or even 1964). No one born outside of those years (in either direction) is a boomer by definition.

Words mean things, and when you misuse them, they lose their meaning and just become useless noises. Just look at how meaningless words such as incel, racist, fascist, Nazi, etc have become over the decades.

Besides, misusing words is just really gay.