Yep, this exactly happened to me. I felt like a taker for always reading SO but not contributing. I saw an answer that was out of date, so I tried to point it out. I couldn't make a comment, so I put it in another answer.
Got banned from answering until I got my points up, and the only way to do that was to ask questions, of which I had none. Never mind that the information I tried to post could have saved someone from going down the wrong path. Totally irrelevant. Rules must be followed.
And then I discovered SO meta. Holy cow. Those people were so far up their own butts, they couldn't see daylight. I was morbidly transfixed.
It's validating to see that I wasn't wrong in my assessment. The comments and takes under the post which showed the drop in traffic was eye opening. That website was just a walking corpse if they weren't seeing the plain truth and spinning the drop in traffic as a good thing, because apparently it meant that they were not getting stupid questions anymore and those were going to AI now.
Not realizing the kind of mind share loss here. The next generation of developers aren't going to go through a phase where they rely on SO.
It's there now. Too late I guess. https://stackoverflow.com/help/what-is-staging-ground
It looks a little different, like a "learn to use stack overflow correctly" type spot. I think what newbies want (I would have loved when I started out) is a "why is my code broken" type spot.