If you are a newish resident most of your Convention Center knowledge is apparently from the pandemic era. So yeah, it was 100% empty during the pandemic, and it's taken a while to ramp back up to normal business.

I think rather than going by how it "feels" to you at street level, you might want to look at some actual figures about number and size of events that are held there. The flower show, the car show, these are things that locals attend and are not representative; they don't bring in the hotel business.