If it were just a matter of upvotes and downvotes, that would be one thing, but voting to close a question for being a "duplicate," forcibly terminating an emerging discussion because somebody asked something vaguely similar 10 years ago for a completely different platform or language, is just nuts.

Or closing a general question because in the opinion of Someone Important, it runs afoul of some poorly-defined rule regarding product recommendations.

A StackOverflow that wasn't run like a stereotypical HOA would be very useful. The goal should be to complement AI rather than compete with it.

You’re right, but I suspect that it became this hostile to beginners because of the constant flood of repetitive questions. It’s possible that with LLMs doing this filtering, the community loosen up the hostility when new more and more new questions are stuff LLMs can’t answer.