Maybe it changed, but you could ask and answer questions right after signing up, just commenting, voting, and moderation rights required a certain amount of points. I only answered questions and was among the top 100 contributors at my peak activity but that was at least a decade ago.

I stopped contributing when the question quality fell of a cliff. Existing contributors got annoyed by the low effort questions, new users got annoyed because their questions got immediately closed, it was no longer fun. There were a lot of discussions on meta how to handle the situation but I just left.

So admittedly things might have changed again, I do not really know much about the development in the last ten or so years.