But let me address the "toxic" moderation. They needed something like appeals courts. SO should have installed a layers above the community mods that could review and rebuke the decisions of the "lower" mods to steer things.

Oops, all assholes.

I don't understand this at all. In its heyday, I found it working really well. The questions that would be closed were either copy-pastes of homework tasks, vague descriptions of some overarching goal ("how do I implement this?"), walls of code ("why does this crash?"), or obvious duplicates.

I think it's good that the site got rid of those quickly. Sure there'd be some snarky high-rep users around, but they'd mostly listen to facts or at least be drowned out by more useful contributions.

LLMs are most commonly blamed, but the drop started way before those became popular. I'm confident that its horrid moderation drove people away long before AI had a chance to. Nothing's quite as demoralizing as:

Q: Why does adding two Python objects fails although their classes are compatible?

A: [closed as a duplicate of "Why do people say JavaScript is weakly typed?"]

I'm a reasonably bright person, with scads of StackOverflow fake-karma-Internet-points, but even I gave up trying to ask a question. There just aren't enough hours in the day to fight with hermits seeking the Ultimate Question and downvoting everything else.

That was that for that site.