It's possible that Google is leading me astray since that's typically how I'll find Q&As on there, but I don't see the same issue on the other sites in the Stack network.
In these cases, the technology needs to keep pace with the systems (both computer systems and people systems) that it supports. Failure to do that means that the people who are creating content are having to expend more effort to make up for it.
Be it people leaving, or needing to spend more effort to attain the same quality - the result is the same. The quality of the site (questions and answers) is diminishing as people are less able to provide good answers and curate existing material to make good content more visible.
I am not sure if SO is less useful or just has become less useful _for_me_ over time.
IMO "use the documentation" is not enough, many times you have much more complex question or bugs/problems where if lucky other individuals hit them before you and were kind enough to share their findings. I upgraded my Ubuntu version and now some people decided that is safer and smarter to move the /tmp in apache to some other place but at the same time hide it from me, I am not sure what man page search query for "my file is not in /tmp but the system is telling me is there" will give you the results.
On some stacks, you depend on SO for everything. Others have much more complete and usable documentation somewhere else that answers any question that SO would accept, so people don't need it at all.
In addition to that, quality of experience, code, as well as quality of documentation increased comparing to before .net core. I find myself often going to the official docs for documentation now, or just look in the sources or even debug the internals using available debug symbols.
I save references I use a lot, like the HTML spec, as PDFs. MacOS indexes these PDF files, so a search in Finder is usually all I need to bring the correct document.
If I can't find a reference locally, or know it doesn't exist locally, I'll turn to the Internet. Once I find the bit of information I'm looking for I'll either save the website as a PDF, or save the info in Snippetlabs or Bear so I can search for it next time I need it.
edit: It's not back.
