Contact list grayed out in Outlook for Mac

I surely can't answer why but it is clear it must be intentional. The lack of contact lists and client side filtering rules was always part of Outlook and before than Entourage for Mac. It has actually been over a year, as Office 2019 Outlook (new not legacy) lacked these same features. I guess MS thinks Mac users are in awe of the colors?

When asked about this feature and its importance in an enterprise/professional email client, ChatGPT said "Contact Groups (or Distribution Lists) are considered a key feature for enterprise email clients, as they allow users to quickly and easily send emails to a group of contacts without having to manually add each recipient individually. While the ability to create Contact Groups is not the only factor that determines whether an email client is considered a professional or enterprise-grade email client, it is certainly an important feature for many businesses and organizations."

I think we all (including AI) are stumped by the lack of this feature ONE YEAR later. Or maybe Office on the Mac should be free like Thunderbird (which can make mailing lists by the way).

Here it is exactly one year later from the MS response above, and still no contact lists for "new" outlook. So any update on when this will be added? it's really too bad, because new Outlook for Mac is indeed so much better than the old Outlook for Mac…

I see once again that MS is determined to switch me over to the "new" outlook, although I don't want to. At every update it appears that it will automatically load the POC version. I have the following at the top of my current Outlook "The New Outlook for Mac is here. The new version will launch the next time Outlook restarts" I find this entire process annoying. Plus this crippled version is a half baked version from Windows. I am going to really get serious about finding an alternative as one of these days they may disable the reversion option and I will be screwed.