W h a t ? I couldn't disagree with your comment more.
StackOverflow, and the slew of substacks, are/were almost entirely volunteer run. From the questions, to the answers, to the moderation.
Like yeah, there's assholes everywhere, and yeah tech jockies are always snooty when they think they know better. I don't think any of this is the fault of StackOverflow necessarily, it's just a format that isn't a forum. They were, and are, a QA site where they wanted answers from the people that knew. Not discussions. Not the same question asked a hundred times. Not quick homework answers.
StackOverflow is one of the defacto ways I still get programming answers and knowledge from. So much so that I haven't needed to ask a question in a long time. It's robotic, it's uniform, it's boring, but it's is/was such a useful website.
IMO it's downfall was not promoting more community and branching our beyond QA and into discussion based topics and chats. Not being able to see that people needed a space outside their QA model and not trying to harness that in their hay day cost them everything. Now AI has scrapped all their content.
How do you sort through the trash though?
The thing about SO is there really is a ton of poorly phrased or poorly researched questions asked each hour. So, how do you find quality questions to dedicate your time answering? How do you search QA when there's a number of similar questions asked?
That's the thing StackOverflow was trying to solve.
There's millions of people with programming questions that think their problem is unique or they simply don't understand how to research their issue, so you end up with a ton of bad or duplicated questions.