Your link does nothing to establish the "why". It just shows that some recent questions were downvoted. Which is a completely different issue from question closure, and there's nothing to say it isn't deserved.

> Nothing's quite as demoralizing as

I can tell you from years and years of experience that this is just not what happened in the common case. Of course, there were a few incidents where someone slipped up, which is why there was a meta site to discuss these things. And in the cases where someone had a point about a wrong duplicate closure on meta, that was well received and the problem got fixed.

But we also got a constant stream of people complaining about the equivalent of:

Q. How do I iterate over a tuple?

A. [closed as a duplicate of "how do I iterate over a list?"]

and it became clear that the OP was not even willing to try the code provided, which would work for their situation.

There were cases where people refused to recognize a duplicate of what was clearly the same question, because a different code sample was provided with different variable names or something.

There were people whose argument essentially boiled down to "you shouldn't close duplicates as duplicates ever, because that's how I think it should work". IOW, a complete refusal to engage with the site's policy or the clearly established, stated reasons behind it (and the many years of history needed to refine that policy).

> but even I gave up trying to ask a question.

I think it's quite easy to ask a question that meets standards; it just requires skills (basic debugging / communicating a clear unambiguous specification) that don't necessarily align with the people who are most likely to want to ask questions generally (beginners).

If there's a specific question you wanted to ask but felt unable to, post it here and I'll be happy to explain where it might have been lacking.