To be fair how people learn on the internet has changed too and I fully admit that. Prior to SO you had to read quite a bit of answers that were close but not quite what you were looking for, but by going through that process of reading you learned quite a bit more as to how things worked, what the language/software/hardware was trying to do and I feel as a result grasped a deeper understanding to the problem and technology you were using. Now, questions and answers are much more specific and thus create a much more of a copy and paste environment where people just get stuff in and hope it works without really learning the how and why. Part of that is because the need for programmers over the past 20 years has grown to such an extent people really don't care as much about the quality of work as long as it sort of works. They needed a programmer with a pulse and will fix poor quality work later because they need to ship now. Hardware also vastly outpaced the programs in performance so doing things in a less than best manner wasn't as evident. Just a generational/era thing.

SO definitely tried to reinvent the 'manual' for many years, which was silly when there was already a manual to read.