When I pointed out that it's not the responsibility of the one answering to search for dupes, but for the one asking, I was told that I should still invest the time or otherwise don't answer at all.
Remember all users are moderators. There are some explicit moderators but they don"t close or downvote often they deal with other problems - or on smaller sites just use normal user powers to vote and close.
The fault finding culture of SO is toxic.
The aim of SO is to provide answers to a question.
You do not want many questions with the same answer as if you have a new answer or a comment on this duplicate answer you need to then add it to all the questions. Thus we want to collapse all these multiple questions into one.
Also the person who I was replying to did noit seem to understand that they were a moderator, moderators are not a separate set of people to users.
However SO Inc wants money and so more users.
You can"t expect the answerer to answer each individual question which is the same, especially as the answer might have been given over 10 yuears ago?
What do you expect a good answerer to do with a question asked for the hundredth time?
SO will remain as a library for unseen problems, which is what's supposed to be good for.
Stack Overflow has a lot of stridently opinionated jerks contributing to it, and if I can just ask ChatGPT a question and get an answer that works rather than having to deal with being belittled by those people, then I'm probably having a much better day as a result.