This reminds me of Wikipedia. The hardcore contributors/maintainers cop a whole lot of criticism, and I'm sure some of it is justified (though some is clearly just nerd-shaming), but people rarely acknowledge how amazing it is that the project is basically a success, and how quickly it could degenerate if the most dedicated 'loosened up' or lost interest.
That's an interesting opinion. My impression is that the overwhelming majority of good content on SO is grandfathered from when moderation was much less strict.
That's up to the point that finding good answers to problems with new software is hard nowadays.
Dupes have their uses - they do a pretty good job of ensuring a wider variety of Google searches lead to the answer. Basically, a built in “this paragraph is a synonym for this other one”.
That’s really not been my experience. I find the non duplicate question is normally somewhat related but not actually useful, being subtly different or quite old etc.
That said while SO has been effectively useless to me for years, if you find it’s helpful then more power to you.
