I'm used to enjoying your comments here, but this is an unusually bad take, and frankly personally hurtful. None of this was ever about that kind of power or control, and hearing constant accusations to the contrary was one of the things that compounded the stress of curation for me.
SO did develop a community in a way, but it was primarily the gatekeepers and rule enforcers adopting positions of pseudo-power. They liked using the sites’ rules as a way to control conversations and downvote questions.
Every internet community I’ve interacted with that builds up a lot of rules turns into this eventually. It becomes an attractant for users who really like memorizing all of the rules and deploying them on other people.