What bothers about gatekeeping? I could guess, but I'm asking so you say it out loud. Then you can compare it against other problems, such as moats (competitive barriers).
OpenAI spent something like $3M on training GPT-3. This is a pretty big moat. But almost certainly more valuable in dollar terms is the first-mover advantage which provides millions of human eye-hours used for RLHF.
I wouldn't be so eager to trade the gatekeepers you so fear for even an openly available chat service that is happy to automate away as much information work as possible.
The Stack Overflow model is (was) pretty darn good -- people help each other out, the company made money, some people got noticed for their skills, products got build faster and better (on the whole, I hope). Contrast the human-generated content era to what we have now which appears to be the machine-ingesting content era. There are legions of lawsuits against companies scraping data without permission and/or attribution.
Don't flatter yourself. People want to solve their problems so that they can build what they want to. They don't have time for shenanigans from internet jerks who get their validation from imaginary internet points.
If it is unregulated then it will be exploited to the maximum profit, consequences be damned.
I both find it respectful of who wrote the answer in the first place and useful for future users of the code: the Stack Overflow answer often provides context and explanation for what would otherwise be an obscure piece of code.
Pretty darn useful if you ask me: those who want to have more information can follow the link, casual readers can skip it, and the whole process if fair to the author.
It embarrasses me to think that somebody should feel obliged to cite me when they use one of my answers. I don't know how to take the partnership with Openai though. They bill me when I use their service, it's not collaborative like Stackoverflow.
For the easy answers LLMs are fine, but I usually want an answer to a niche issue or edge case, where LLMs have to be constantly told they are plain wrong, before getting to something resembling an answer.