I think you're onto something. I remember myself, as a young developer and a fresh university student mostly reading programming forums or browsing newsgroups. Even more so official documentation for a programming language or a library.

Only know, having 10+ years of experience behind me, I find myself stumbling upon SO because I know exactly what I'm looking for. In other words, my path to finding the answer is shorter. So it's just a time saver.

I find issues on Github (for open source software) to be frequently of a similar value to me.