Ironically, they insisted at a very narrow definition of the question and answer format and consequently failed at creating a good wiki. There is no way to approach broader topics. It’s always „how do I do x“, and the accepted answer since 2013 is a jquery plugin which is missing a maintainer since 2015.

The rules there just don't encourage updating answers or re-asking things already asked. I've always said, StackOverflow is a great resource if your specific question is "How would I have done this programming thing back in 2010?"

Ironically, I predicted this already back in 2010 (or whenever the site started). I knew from the outset that disallowing duplicates forever was not future-proof, and that the voting mechanism will favor answers posted earlier, not answers that are more correct or up to date.

>When StackOverflow was new I visited frequently to enjoy the community talking about programming.

I don't remember it ever being that and I was on it right from the start. Anything subjective was shut down in an instant (for good reason).

It was not. A lot of the questions that would now be rejected for “subjectivity” were initially allowed, then at some point migrated to a separate instance, called “programmers.stackexchange.com” and deleted from the main site. Of course, over time, even that website lost the community and was later renamed to https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/ and became the same kind of hostile hellhole.

The fact that you added “for good reason” implies that you agree with the sentiment that the website shouldn't have a community that socializes, so I'm not surprised that you tuned it out and didn't notice it being driven off the website. From your perspective this may be a case of “good riddance”, but for many including myself, it was quite sad (and still is).