It still seems a bit too simplistic… no one imagined that Google could behave less than 100% virtuously in the future? Really?

I don’t think there’s anything virtuous or non-virtuous about it. The internet is a big place and search engines aren’t optimized to produce results according to singular sites’ idiosyncrasies.

The obvious flaw in Stack Overflow’s bias toward closing new questions is that over time the best pages are also the oldest and most stale. They even locked questions with enough answers to prevent new content from being added, guaranteeing that they became stale.

Yet at the same time they allowed new questions to be asked and indexed by search engines, but didn’t allow new answers to that new content. So the freshest and most recent content was also the worst.

I don’t see this as a “Google bad” moment. It’s a failure of Stack Overflow in clinging to their oldest content and building rules that made all new posts frustrating and unhelpful.

It worked that way for its first ten plus years. Why would it change? Why/How could you plan for an unknown future. Personally I’m horrible at predicting the future, so I don’t blame them.