As much as SEO experts would love to do that for their clients, I don't see any way they could've realistically crossed that moat. If you had a programming question, and you went to Google to answer it and found some answers - would you choose Stack Overflow, or PythonIsSuperFun.com? I think the behaviour of Google searching for programming issues decreased overall, and I don't think Stack Overflow suffered more than any other site. Disclosure: I've nearly abandoned SO for ChatGPT myself.