It would be more honest if they'd delete locked questions from the site, then they at least wouldn't spam Google result pages ... but the way it's currently implemented is infuriating.
I have found that MDN is a way better resource, including pedagogic examples for most (if not all) concepts without using bloated libraries.
Yeah, I don't think StackOverflow is your problem. I mean, if they're going to blindly paste code, surely doing that from community-curated examples is better than whatever junk they'd find.
It reminds me of the 'wikipedia can be wrong!' crowd - yes, that's inherant to the format. Yes, you are going to need to check things you read there, yes, your 20 page essay about why you are the best person in the world is going to get deleted.
Every time I see a critisism of SO, I tend to see someone who would make the site worse or is misusing the site. Not saying SO is perfect - more can be done to help those people become good contributors or users, but SO is very well designed, and the quality of the content is really very good.
The second issue is with understanding. I hold a firm rule, never commit code that you do not fully understand. Because when it breaks, you will have no idea how to fix it. Too often I see developers copy/paste directly, and just change variable names. You aren't writing code, you're playing dev Lego.
My final issue is their draconian insistence on what they consider subjective question locking. When I'm making a technological choice, I'm looking for real world usage, and comparisons between frameworks. These questions can be asked and answered in non-subjective ways; yet even when done so, anything with the word "compare" gets locked. This would be the real value to me, as my research time is very limited, and being able to exclude frameworks and tools based on objective comparisons of feature sets or capabilities and limitations would be highly valuable to me.