I agree, but I'm afraid the downvotes are inevitable. SO for a long time had by a very long shot the best signal-to-noise ratio of any free-as-in-beer Q&A channel. Basically any live comms channels (IRC, Matrix, and so on) disincentivise clear, thoughtful responses in favour of streams of consciousness. And forums is where information goes to die, as every question turns into a huge back-and-forth until the question is sufficiently refined to receive a useful answer, which is usually extremely specific ("run this command") rather than generally applicable ("you need to frobnicate the foon, for example by running this command").
Unfortunately anything popular is a target, and once they stopped trying to innovate to keep ahead of systems gaming they were going to lose eventually. It's amazing it took this long.