Did you genuinely enjoy spending time with him/them?
I'm glad you are satisfied with how things turned out. (Sorry, don't mean to 'dig' or 'nitpick' but can't walk pass it...or a wording 'glitch' maybe... "don't see recently" & "I'm not the person" but "good friends" = that's an interesting way to put it.)
Dunno about this... It pretty much sounds like avoidance, 'zoning out'. As in: to meet but 'not be there for each other', it's like the participants are 'stock', replaceable. Because in the end you can say you've met, though not sure if you really 'met'. Proximity isolation is a tough thing to experience.
Everything has it's right time and place, opening up about sensitive topics has to be a conscious decision, nobody likes to be revealed unexpected... I can understand that too.
He might have avoided, yes. It might have never occurred to him to see you / spend time together.
A bit of (unrelated?) ramble, feel free to skip...
I also have seen it plenty of times when people (men & women) claiming to be open to discussing deep subjects but once a precipice is near in sight, they back down, restart the exploration from scratch... saying: 'Oh, it's not that deep, it's not the right time, here given the surroundings to discussing it...' (=I don't want to look) Almost as if they knew, once a certain sets of words is spoken they have to do something about it and they rather not do it. I always wondered if this was censorship or sadism or both. I mean it would be natural to circle back willingly later but somehow that never seemed to be the case with this set of individuals, mainly that's why I try to keep my distance.