I mean people talking like "Have you heard of the forum where you can offer technical and businessideas to someone else without paying to get on the site". If you already have some users kindly ask them to tell friends about it. But yes, if you aim for generating users, SEO is your friend and you could use AdSense or Google Ads.

NodeBB SEO is in fine fettle.

cloudflare is bad for traffic

Returns this thread as the #1 result in duckduckgo 😳

Does this answer the question?

Thank you for the idea of SEO.

a. I agree with @julian there are philosophical disagreement
b. agree, adding Google schema support could be built-in like we have seen FB open graph is built-in
c. not a forum, try other software
d. would be helpful, could be done by a plugin. Argueable could be built-in too, IMHO
e. I have nothing against but I think it would be a large project because I could picture some addition live ML and log mining needs to be developed for this to be generalized, and could complicate the core NodeBB a lot.
f. not a forum, sounds to me a social network
g. has been done by plugin and you could pretty much develop it yourself.
h. not thing against it, I think it currently works.
i. it's more of a site operating and community engagement strategy
j. not a forum
k. Good idea, could be done by plugin
l. This is already in place, right
m. good idea. I don't see why not but I assume it already works
n. same as k