I feel like this argument is akin to "back before cars, I used to walk all the time, and I was in much better shape." There's nothing to stop you from going and doing it again!

Well, yes and no... As an Apple developer, I used to be able to rely entirely on Inside Macintosh books because Apple’s docs were the best in the business, probably the best ever. Nowadays, even if I wanted to rely on Apple’s own documentation, I can’t, because the docs are just no good any more.

(Their header files are still very informative! But much less so in the Swift era, sadly...)

To use your analogy, I’d really like to walk as much as I used to, but they ripped up all the walkable districts to build highways!

I don’t think things are bad across the board, at least. For example, you can get a very long way in Javascript purely from MDN rather than needing SO.