Reserves are assets of banks that can only be held by banks. They can't get rid of them in aggregate.
Loans are also assets of banks, and are created against supplied collateral along with the corresponding advance. The amount of reserves a bank has is irrelevant to that operation.
Didn't they lower the reserve requirement to 0 at the start of the pandemic?
The private banks borrow money from each other and also (especially the biggest ones) from the Fed and loan it out to people, companies or other banks with extra interest added on top. Reserves don't matter until there is a shortage of liquidity and in that case, there are bailouts. In the meantime, banks will just loan however much money they can to however many borrowers they can find who appear to be able to afford it.
Reserves are one (largely unimportant) brake on lending. Many western central banks have never had a reserve requirement.
The more important limits to lending are regulatory capital controls which measure both the asset to liabilities mix but also the credit and interest rate risk of the asset mix and loan to deposit ratio.
The latter is a commonly tracked metric by bank investors and they typically view a ratio of higher than 0.8 with suspicion (down from 0.9 post 2008).
The US banking industry ratio is about .63 right now which is up from a pandemic low of .57 but still down from the pre-pandemic ratio of .75.
That banks were not lending enough was the reason the fed removed the reserve requirement.
Reserves are assets of banks that can only be held by banks. They can't get rid of them in aggregate.
Loans are also assets of banks, and are created against supplied collateral along with the corresponding advance. The amount of reserves a bank has is irrelevant to that operation.