As everyone is saying, it was already down-trending before AI, and probably experts exchange traffic and whatever came before looks similar

Also not sure exactly when they added the huge popup[0] that covers the answer (maybe only in Europe as it's about cookies?) but that's definitely one of the things that made me default reach for other links instead of SO.

[0] https://i.imgur.com/Z7hxflF.png

Those popups were a big contributor for me to stop using SO. I stopped updating my uBlock origin rules when LLMs became good enough. I am now using the free Kimi K2 model via Groq over CLI, which is much faster.