SO did go overboard at times; I’ve seen quite a few instances where posts were locked for being “duplicates” of completely unrelated problems. Oftentimes they were accompanied with unnecessarily rude messages as well.

But yes, the unwillingness of some (most?) people to use the search function baffles me. They’d prefer to write a narrative essay in SO for their FizzBuzz assignment and argue with mods rather than type a few keywords to instantly get the solution.