> Stack Overflow isn’t dead because of AI. It’s dead because they spent years ignoring user feedback

It is dead because of both of those things. Everyone hated Stackoverflow's moderation, but kept using it because they didn't have a good alternative until AI.

> When AI arrived I'd already been waiting for years for an alternative that didn’t aggressively shut down real-world questions

Exactly.

I'm not sure that AI has as much impact on resources like SO as one might imagine. There is one reason why I resort to using AI, and two reasons why I always double check its answers.

The reason why I resort to AI is to find out alternative solutions quickly. But quite honestly, it's more of a problem with SO moderation. People are willing to answer even stale, actual/mistaken duplicate or slightly/seemingly irrelevant questions with good quality solutions and alternatives. But I always felt that their moderation dissuaded the contributors from it.

Meanwhile, the first reason why I always double check the AI results is because they hallucinate way too much. They fake completely believable answers far too often. The second reason is that AI often neglects interesting/relevant extra information that humans always recognize as important. This is very evident if you read elaborate SO answers or official documentation like MDN, docs.rs or archwiki. One particular example for this is the XY-problem. People seem to make similar mistaken assumptions and SO answers are very good at catching those. Recipe-book/cookbook documentation also address these situations well. Human generated content (even static or archived ones) seem to anticipate/catch and address human misconceptions and confusions much better than AI.