"Why would you want to do that?"
"What's this for?"
"Did you try searching before asking such a stupid question?"
OP bemoaned how people on StackOverflow would tell you not to do what you're asking about. Reference material is not the cause of that "weird bearded guy" problem, but it is one possible solution.
We're talking about software developers, not wizards. It's not like you have to offer a dram of blood and draw a pentagram with salt before you approach the ancient grimoires.
On the good threads that become helpful, yeah.
On most of it, no, those are not the questions people ask there. They will focus on unrelated marginal issues, try to refuse to answer the question, just assume the reason the person is doing it (even when explicitly told on the question), and just throw wrong answers on the wall to see if they stick. (Granted, throwing things on the wall is a useful way to answer some questions, but not all.)
It's good that Google rewards the first kind of thread, but the second one is what sends people away from the platform.
Q: "I'm trying to configure Foo to produce Bar, but it's giving me this error!"
A1: "What are you really trying to do?" [Unsaid: I don't know how to produce Bar either]
A2: "You should not be trying to produce Bar. Instead you should produce Baz. I know how to do that--follow the following steps..."
A3: "Producing Bar will not solve what I imagine your goal is. In the general case, you may need to produce many different results, which I would rather answer about..."
Q: "Uhh, thanks everyone, but I'm just trying to configure Foo to produce Bar."
Many such cases!
The Elixir community talked about this a lot on the forums back when I was active on there, because language rankings look at Stack Overflow questions and Stack Overflow questions proliferate in languages with footguns. "Don't use obviously_named_function(), use obscr_wrd_fcn() instead" fits the SO formula quite well. Well designed languages, Elixir included, don't produce many of those kinds of question/answers. That leaves significantly more room for discourse around architecture and other higher-level conceptual stuff, which doesn't really have one correct answer, and thus is ill-suited for SO, being relegated to the lower-discoverability forums (and worse, the un-discoverable Discord).
Back then, it seemed a lot like that!
>"Why would you want to do that?" because it seems like the right thing to do? Is there a better way.
>"What's this for?" the boss wants it
>"Did you try searching before asking such a stupid question?" I read the manual and thought about it a lot (remember this was pre-Internet)
so, there was a lot of "rough" hand-holding to learn the ropes for edge cases.