In all but one of the cases where I've had questions closed as duplicates, I would have found this actively insulting. That's because all but one of those closures linked to non-duplicates, and in some cases to questions I had already singled out as not applying to my situation.
It's honestly a pretty hard to solve problem, because you're trapped by opposing forces. The sunnier the framing, the less it will sting the people asking the (numerous) duplicate questions - but the more it will irritate people who think (rightly or wrongly) that it's been done in error.
My SO experience seems to have been nonstandard, but it's always looked to me like changing labels and appearances is going to go bust because the rate of actual bad decisions and meanness by power users is too high to build trust.
That's only a win if the duplicate is real. Sometimes questions are closed when they aren't really duplicates.
This is a substantial part of the fighting over the site, though - there are lengthy guides to picking up enough Stack Overflow rep to render the site usable.
I usually see this dismissed with "just help some people and ask some good questions, you'll be there in no time", but when I talk to friends who are getting a self-taught start with programming, I consistently hear a different story. They're getting questions closed as dupes, either because they aren't experienced enough to recognize duplicate questions with different terms or because mods are squelching their genuinely novel questions. And they're new, so they can't answer hard questions - and the easy ones don't produce rep because they're inevitably closed, removing all the payouts for answering them.
I understand the logic behind the rep gating system, it's not a bad idea. But it's just fuel on the fire when things go wrong, and they go wrong a lot in the form of wrongly closed questions.