> It got a lot of hate for the moderation

I can say that easily over 90% (pretty close to 100%) of the most useful answers I would find in stackoverflow back in the day, were from questions/threads that were locked as bad questions (forget what term they used) by those horrible moderators.

It was literally a joke. Every good question with thoughful useful answers, was always poo poo'ed by the moderators.

The only reason stackoverflow remained useful is that those questions and threads remained available and were a treasure trove of useful information. If they'd actually deleted the threads moderators declared useless, there would have been zero useful content on the site.

It is really a monument to failed moderation policies.