Even when there aren’t better sources I’ve found that the SO results are just all outdated and don’t cover any newer stuff. Like they’ve lost all their authors or at least they’re not being indexed by Google.
It's really not convenient to search through those answers even though the knowledge you need is there.
For a long time they argued that duplicate questions were a problem because they weren't trying to be a Q&A site but rather a knowledge database. But it turns out that the duplicate reduction effort has made the knowledge database harder to access for many common queries.
I think their algorithm is the problem, answers should be slowly deprecated over time. Who in real life would trust an answer written 10 years ago when languages, OSes and frameworks change every year?
I've also seen the trending sort automatically applied on certain questions.
SO had various communities and they were quite helpful for the time, and if you hung around for a bit you got quite a good group.
Most of that has (sadly, imo) migrated to Discord.
This is particular annoying when it comes to CLI tools. Often the search top result will show outdated SO post that the command arguements are depreciated, it took me hours to find this out after couldn't figure out why the command are not working. If I search the problem with site:reddit.com, the answer are usually relevant and current with a working command.
SO's overaggressive moderation are preventing the new information from being relevant. That's why people flocks to GitHub, Discord, Reddit, and Steam forums because they don't share the SO moderation philosophy.