Remember that Google is not showing the results the same way to everyone. Maybe others near me are more likely to click on the SO response so I get that one ran

Remember that Google is not showing the results the same way to everyone. Maybe others near me are more likely to click on the SO response so I get that one ranked higher, and less likely to click on the reference documentation, so I get targeted the same way. Maybe if I let Google learn my patterns instead of disabling all the tracking I can, it'd give me better results. FWIW, I get similar results with DDG, but Google wins hands-down on non-English searches.