I don't think it's in dispute that SO has to deal with a lot of identical low effort questions. What people don't like is that the moderators and power users ar

I don't think it's in dispute that SO has to deal with a lot of identical low effort questions. What people don't like is that the moderators and power users are entrenched against duplicates in particular in a way that makes the site hostile by default to questions that are not outstandingly original, but are nevertheless legitimately different. Subreddits deal with the same issue (tons of identical basic questions) but have better processes to divert them and educate the user while still letting legitimate mid-level questions live by default. There are bad subreddits where moderators make it hard to get help, but since redditors can move to better communities on the same topic (and duplicate all the content!) users don't feel stuck with the current moderation in the same way they do on SO, which doesn't let competing Q&A communities exist for the same topic. I understand that SO has done some work to address these issues in the last few years and want to credit that too. That work is another indicator that there is a problem. I also agree that leadership-moderation relations are a problem on SO.