The culture of programming has been changed by much of these "quick answer" tools.
The first generation of SO people were folks who cut their teeth pre (or early) internet when it required quite a bit of effort to learn a technology. Mistakes without googlable solutions, patchy documentation, bad or non existent internet forced people to work hard to figure things out that it's in that effort where, in my experience, learning happens.
These people contributed to the early SO and genuinely enriched it. Made it a source of high quality topical information. Over the years though, it's become a source of cut/paste code and then perhaps cut/pasted code (driven by the gamification). Few people go there anymore to contribute well written deeply thought out answers. It's mostly fly bys I imagine.
I used to train freshers and over the years, I can distinctly see the decrease in quality and the increasing tendency to have SO, ChatGPT, whatever just "solve this problem for me" rather than "I want to learn this and get better at my job".
I think, SO, for the most part was a genuinely well intentioned effort with really good outcomes.
Spolsky's earlier talks describing his philosophies about a good QA site, I thought, were insightful. To their credit, they did organically reach the top of Google rankings and for a long time, the quality of answers and insights on the site were really good. I learned a lot of from reading answers to various questions by Alex Martelli and Raymond Hettinger (of Python fame).
I'm sure they made some mistakes along the way and those contributed to the current downfall. My larger point, however, is that this and other tools and sites which make things "easy" have contributed to a decline in the quality of (especially new) programmers and that has indirectly taken a toll on the site.
To extend your chef analogy, the rant would be "Here I am trying to create interesting dishes with modern ingredients but people these days haven't tasted really food and can't digest anything other than a quick burger, canned soda and frozen fries."
The first generation of SO people were folks who cut their teeth pre (or early) internet when it required quite a bit of effort to learn a technology. Mistakes without googlable solutions, patchy documentation, bad or non existent internet forced people to work hard to figure things out that it's in that effort where, in my experience, learning happens.
These people contributed to the early SO and genuinely enriched it. Made it a source of high quality topical information. Over the years though, it's become a source of cut/paste code and then perhaps cut/pasted code (driven by the gamification). Few people go there anymore to contribute well written deeply thought out answers. It's mostly fly bys I imagine.
I used to train freshers and over the years, I can distinctly see the decrease in quality and the increasing tendency to have SO, ChatGPT, whatever just "solve this problem for me" rather than "I want to learn this and get better at my job".