SO is one of the few places on the internet that give me a positive experience pretty much every time I go there.

Type in my programming question, go to the page, scroll down and see a wide variety of idiomatic, well-researched and thoroughly critiqued solutions, very readable, ready to copy, and with the concepts spelled out to study up on.

Stack Overflow has only become more popular since I used it.

I used to answer people's questions. These days I'll go to a section like Node.js and frankly anyone who asked a good, focused question has been answered and you're left sifting through the low-tier questions of people posting an unformatted 1000-line code snippet with "it doesn't work".

Seems to be working pretty well.

Anecdata: I have a question where I was calling super() incorrectly, and another where my reproduction was flawed, not showing what I thought it did. No closures or hostility. Maybe I've been lucky, maybe the advice for asking good questions works.

In any case the act of composing a question according to the guide has answered many more questions than I've actually posted -- some due to the rubber-ducking, others via the "check out these questions" feature.

(This is all orthogonal to the recent issues wrt moderators and community managers)

That's not what the close button does and it typically requires a few confirmations from other users, so you can't close things randomly yourself. Almost all close votes are reasonable - have a look at the "close vote" moderation queue.

It may seem beginner hostile sometimes, but in practice it's mostly: you can't have a personal approach to everyone when looking through hundreds of messages.

I'm at 60k reputation so I have a decent idea of how it works. My point is that you probably should have a personal approach before voting 'close'.

If you don't, there's no real harm in leaving bad questions open until there is someone else in the community willing to help out.

I find myself looking at closed questions wanting to help but unable to too many times.

I don't disagree. I just don't think this can be enforced in any way. Community defines itself. We've got 75042 people who can cast close votes. Requiring multiple votes helps, but you can't make that many people behave the same way with the same values.

Yeah, and it's full of low quality drive-by responses by people using it to build their personal brand. Not quite on the same level as say Quora, SO seems to have better checks in place to keep things from degenerating that much. It's definitely present though, just less overt.

Quite the contrary experience, it's specially hostile to knowledgeable people. My last 3-4 questions were all closed because I wrote targeting experts and the mods had trouble understanding what I was asking.

Do you have an example?

Not without sacrificing my privacy :(