Another point of course is that each new question is more and more likely to be already answered. At some point the site pretty much covers most of what is to be answered.
These days you can go to the repo and there’s usually already an issue open with the problem and a workaround. Or if someone has a question on how to use the tool/software they ask there.
Before GH boomed it was often SO doing this job.
This, and first party developer forums. iOS questions will go directly to Apple's community forums. Same for SalesForce, or Elastic search etc.
There's just a higher noise/signal ratio, a real chance to get answers from experts, and it makes for a stepping stone if the issues needs to be bumped to paid support.
Yeah, except for when there should be current answers. Most of computing is in constant flux. There's a mountain of 10+ year old answers that simply don't apply any more.
Yes.
They belong on the existing question - unless the existing question is poorly asked and the new one is better asked.
New answers can, by default, be added at any time - and should, if existing answers are actually out of date rather than simply being old. (Many 10+ year old answers really do still apply.)
Asking the question again is not how the site is designed or intended to work.
Which is fine. If your question is not answered by `site:stackoverflow.com how to do the thing` but it is answered by an LLM taking `how do I do the thing?` as a prompt and synthezising existing Stack Overflow content, that is inherently not a suitable Stack Overflow question. Because anyone else could put `how do I do the thing?` into the same LLM. It's not any different from using a traditional search engine.
(And when the LLM fails by producing a wrong synthesis, then blessing that result by putting it on Stack Overflow is actively harmful - which is why it's banned by policy.)
AI has the ability combine answers from multiple sources and tailor-make to your exact prompt details. Now that is something we call glove fits the hand. Plus it can explain its answers.