If you were in the New queue, and found a question you could answer, by the time you posted your answer the question itself may have been nuked by mods making your answer/effect not seen by many.
It's considered part of your responsibility, as someone answering questions, to understand the standards for closing questions (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/417476) and the motivations behind those standards, and to skip over (better yet, flag or vote to close) those not meeting those standards (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/429808).
You complain, but actually the deck is heavily stacked in your favour: there is a 5-minute grace period on answers; plus you can submit the answer by yourself, regardless of your reputation score, while typical closures (not duplicates and not questions flagged and then seen by someone on the very small moderation team) require three high-rep users (and it used to be five) to agree.
However, the question was not "nuked": the OP gets at least 9 days to fix it and submit for reconsideration before the system deletes it automatically (unless it's so bad that multiple even higher rep users take even further consensus action, on the belief that it fundamentally can't be fixed: see https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/426214/when-is-it-a...).
And this overwhelmingly was not done "by mods". It's done by people who acquired significant reputation (of course, this also generally describes the mods), typically by answering many questions.