The nice thing about Usenet is that you had access to real experts. If your question was good enough, you could get an answer from someone that wrote the drivers for the OS you were struggling with or whatever.
Before that, you'd get books out of the library and get a pad of paper and hand-assemble 6502 code and read Byte magazine and if it took a long time, you learned it very very solidly. So I'd say I got a level of deep understanding from hand-assembling code for 6502 that I (as a fogey) doubt I would ever get from any amount of SO reading. Tho my general work flow once I start typing is to google every thing that I can't instantly fix; weird compiler error, cut and paste into search bar, optionally add "stack" to the end and read.
Yes. There is a lot more information out there now, but the average quality is a lot lower. This isn't unreasonable given the growth of the industry, and the number of people who do at least some programming as part of their job but are mostly doing glue programming. These days that's the majority of a much larger group, thought it used to be much smaller.
The next version might implement a versioning strategy, say questions/answers get archived every five years or so.