ranjit Yes, I think it's a very important skill to be able to actively hear the rhythm and clap or dance along to an external source. There are many ways to hone this ability, including things like dancing or making music together with others either singing or playing.
But playing with good rhythm requires multiple skills and when we notice that we have "sloppy rhythm" I think it's necessary to try to pinpoint what exactly the problem is in order to be able to improve efficiently. If it's difficult to play along with a ticking metronome the problem can be that we find it difficult to align to an external rhythm (there's currently another thread about that) or it can be that the piece is a stretch of our current ability to read or technically perform the movements so we struggle to keep up with the metronome clicking away at a speed that is simply too fast for us at the moment. It can also be that we didn't realize that we actually don't keep a steady internal rhythm, perhaps because the character or difficulty of the piece varies throughout or that we don't know all parts of it equally well. Or we may misjudge the actual amount of accelerando and ritardando we do.
I may have misunderstood the OP, and I apologize if I jumped to conclusions, but I interpreted the problem to be more along the lines of not being able to keep a steady pulse without an external source. That was what my previous reply addressed.
Based on the video I linked to, it seems to be the experience of dr Molly Gebrian that her students typically eventually learn to play along with a metronome and she said that only after having reached that stage they're ready to work on steadying their internal pulse, which looking at the brain activity is a more complex task than synchronizing to an external beat.
That said, studies indicate a distribution in rhythmic ability among people, and as hobbyists statistically a few will likely have to come to terms with that they will never excel rhythmically, but hopefully be able to enjoy playing anyway. In a study linked to by @Sophia (iirc) in the thread about sense of rhythm they said that a large majority of the people who had self-identified as lacking rhythm actually possessed the ability to eventually learn to clap along in time but a minority of around 3% of the population didn't achieve this even with practice. This seems like a plausible figure to me, just judging by my own experience. Growing up from a preschooler and well into my thirties I used to dance regularly, learning a number of different dances in formal classes as well as participating in open "practice evenings" or "social dance nights" or even week-long dance camps where learners and teachers of vastly different levels would dance together. As adults, in classes of typically 15-20 pairs where we rotated so that I as a female would dance with each of the guys at some point, there would often be 1 or 2 who even after years of dancing sometimes would ask me to count aloud as they themselves were unable to hear the downbeats. Didn't stop them from enjoying dancing, though. Likewise, having played with school and amateur orchestras, some of which had no formal audition procedure at all, there could be players who had played for a long time but had varying degrees of difficulty with timing. Nonetheless they enjoyed their instrumental hobby and were usually valued members of the group.
Having started with dance and eurythmics classes at a young age and school music, children's choirs and recorder group lessons not that much later, I don't remember if I personally ever had problems perceiving or synchronizing to external rhythms. So whatever (little) focused rhythm practice I've done over the years has instead been mostly towards keeping a constant internal pulse over extended time spans (my weakest point when it comes to rhythm) and a tiny bit towards increasing the accuracy of executing rhythms exactly as written (very important in orchestras). I had some ear training software on my computer 20-30 years ago that I used mainly to practice sight-singing but among other exercises it also had a part where you should tap, clap or play a randomly generated rhythm and get feedback on the accuracy. I assume there must be several similar apps or online sites nowadays.
Sorry about rambling post, couldn't sleep...