if early stackoverflow moderation was strict it was strict in a way that was invisible to people who genuinely needed the help. later on it got people who thought the strictness was the main point, and that they had to be vigilant defenders of the purity of the site (wikipedia had a similar malaise).

I personally gave up on the site entirely when I saw a very valid question from an inexperienced programmer closed as a duplicate and redirected to a question about a similar problem that did not actually address what they were asking.

I found this often for C# (and sometimes Typescript) related stuff... redirected to a question with a wrong/useless answer.

For Java/Python/Javascript it was also the case, but often the answer (proper way of doing things) would be in the comments lower down, probably the size of community was larger.