Why was there such a heavy handed approach to moderation in the first place though? Why not let the community ask the same question over and over again, and let the answers naturally shift with the time?
I'm just not sure what value there was to have a team of people volunteer their time to making sure there were absolutely zero duplicated questions/answers? What problem is that solving? If anything, it is adding problems by not letting the content naturally evolve in time.
If people want to assess the quality of answers, it's better to have multiple data points, and SO could have invested those resources in algorithmically linking similar questions and making it easy to navigate by both answer reputation and time.
Along similarly lines, it seems best to tackle the people trying to game the system algorithmically as well - if content is word for word duplicate, that's a problem which can be solved by computers instead of people (similar text is a solved problem).
It seems the only use case for moderators on SO is for removing truly inappropriate content - it's wild to me that moderators were spending significant amounts of time actually removing technical questions and answers.
It reminds me a bit of reddit moderation, where reddit communities enforce these non-sensical rules and by extension require hugely heavy handed moderation to 'curate' their communities. Like, the headphones subreddit disallows pictures of headphones in boxes. Why? If the community is interested in headphones, what's the difference if it's a box or not? It's not like if you take it out of the box the headphones look different than any picture you can find on the internet.
Seems like many of the problems of moderation are artificial rules endlessly being enforced by real people which ends up just being pseudo 'make busy' work.