> Yes, the complaints are common, here and in many other places.

If almost every developer-centric forum is constantly complaining about you have enough of a broad sampling of a userbase that there's something rotten underneath is it not? Another ref: See the Reddit thread, also rejoicing at StackOverflow's demise. There's definitely something that they did wrong, and to call it "incorrect" IMO is reductive especially when you have almost every developer practically breaking out champagne at the news.

Communities don’t lose goodwill at that scale by accident.

And full disclosure, I am one of those. I hate StackOverflow with a passion. The holier-than-thou attitude of the moderation playing a major role for sure (and the design that screams QA when they want to be a knowledge-base instead)

> I have been involved in this process for years

Maybe your proximity to the system has made the moderation decisions feel natural when you know the underlying rationale, you can argue that the site is "working as designed", but if the design no longer serves the community it depends on, correctness becomes beside the point, and that's not to say half of what decisions the overzealous moderators make are even correct.

> Or "how is my question a duplicate when actually I asked two questions in one and only one of them is a duplicate?" (n.b. the question is required to be focused in the first place, such that it doesn't clearly break down into two separate issues like that)

Or how about a valid question being closed as a duplicate for a completely different unrelated question? These styles of questions are not uncommon to see: "How do I get red apples?" Closed as a duplicate of "Here's how you make applesauce."