I think you'd find society-at-small was contributing, with perhaps 10x larger yet still quite small number posting but watering down useful contributions, 100x that lurking, and 1000x that just drive-by copy-pasting from SO to their IDE.
Source: I bothered a lot of people on the Internet about C++ when I was child.
Information is only useful if it's accessible. If they are asking questions it's because the information they want is in practice not accessible to them.
When I was in high school I read the docs, and learned C++ from books and MSDN. Granted my access to the internet was rather limited back then, but it also never crossed my mind to bother people for things I could easily lookup myself.
Growing up in a RTFM, "search the forum first before asking" environment is seen as toxic today, but it really helps keeping certain behavior in check thats a drag on society as a whole.
One of the best mentors/bosses I ever had never answered coding questions directly, but always in the form of a question so I could look it up and learn for myself.
I try to do the same with my junior devs today, unless there's time constraints or they're under stress, I try to let them figure out the final answer themselves.
I just hit that point with some TensorFlow stuff because I started hitting the limits of what ChatGPT could answer successfully, and I think that's fine. But maybe good that I couldn't get everything out of it or it may have delayed my learning further yet. Which I guess reinforces your point.
So, every comment on a post roughly equals 100 views.