I think you also need to distinguish between actual users and members of the gamified moderator class: an entire class of SO users whose primary involvement was gratuitously closing questions so that they could get more points, or picking up cheap points by re-formatting the one or two variables you missed in your answer. Often with no real evidence that they had anything but very modest technical skills. Those people. If you don't want to call them moderators, so be it. But I'm not sure what you would call them if not "moderator", whether they had some magical shield that nobody paid attention to or not.

Easy to spot. Just spend some time browsing through the activity of super users with astronomical point scores. It's pretty obvious that they were doing what they were doing to get points, rather than to make the site better or easier to use, many of whom had quite unimpressive technical skills.

The obvious toxic effects of gamification was a substantial contributor to my personal drift away from SO. But what really killed my interest: the toxic effects of close-dup, which produced rapidly accelerating content rot. It is true that, at some point, they started applying penalties to old answers; but that seemed to have no real effect on the toxic effects of "close-dup".

e.g. Questions raised against Android 14 being close-dup-ed against questions that were originally raised against Android 4.0, where the top thee answers, each of which had 1400 upvotes, was that "you can't do that", even though you absolutely could on Android 14.

That and the fact that I had discovered (as I think many others had) that you actually got much better answers if you appended "reddit" to the start of you google search queries, and skipped over the SO answers altogether.

My final point score on SO: somewhere around 8,000 I think. So not a casual user. I'm pretty sure that about 3,000 of those points were given for an answer that applied to Android 4.0, that stopped being accurate in Android 9.0, and I (shamefully) never got around to updating for modern Android tools.