That's one way of seeing it. Another way it is that you're part of this hive-mind of people who can afford to occasionally help a random stranger on a topic you care about. Other people do crosswords or sudoku instead.
As a consequence of helping that hive-mind to exist, you can also query it. But ultimately it is a limited resource, so attention and response quality can a be a bit random.
Yes, SE is heavily gamified, monetizes your contributions, exploits your sense of status/vanity. But it's the place where I least mind it. I like being tricked into writing about a topic I care about (refreshing my knowledge instead of scrolling news and being politically manipulated). I like being tricked into writing helpful answers (instead of controversial comments).
Personally, I only asked a single question on Math (but wrote a lot of answers on SO). Maybe knowing how it works helps, but I got an excellent answer (and the name of the problem I was trying to solve).