The users being generally unhelpful wasn't an issue for them, since they were still significantly more helpful than users anywhere else on the internet. Reddit was and still is filled with completely unvetted answers (on pretty much all topics not just programming), Quora was/is a joke, Yahoo answers had some funny posts I guess but nothing you could actually learn from, what else really was there? Before AI, Stack Overflow was as good as it gets.

It's both. Users tolerated the hostile environment to an extent as long as the site was still the best way to get useful information. When LLMs came out, that was no longer the case.

It just accelerated the trend, and I am sure that reddit took over for a lot of new users. The different problems with SO has been well documented.

And they killed maybe one of the most side features of it : https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/415293/sunsetting-j...

So yeah metakill your own brands with stupid policies.

There was also the pattern of "closing as already answered" with an answer from 6 years earlier which wasn't actually answering the question when you dig into it. Certainly in the code stacks.