Either you're being sarcastic, or you have no familiarity with the history of science.

The rest of your answer shows another aspect of what's wrong with Stack Overflow: zealous mods who get an idea of the perfect question into their heads, and then who go out to purge anything that doesn't conform, regardless of whether others find it (and its response) useful or interesting.

This question is useful as a place for blogposts to link to, not as a primary answer to a question you might Google. So it's 'wrong' for stackoverflow in that sense. But no, I'm not agreeing that mods should have closed it, and I didn't say it should have been purged from SO. Luckily, it hasn't been, so we can stop worrying.

I completely disagree. If you are a new programmer who knows nothing about a certain topic/keyword/etc, googling "what would I use <x> for" is not only not being "up to no good", it's just plain common sense and curiosity. How else might one learn about entirely new things?

Maybe they would be better categorized into some group that is more appropriate, but then you lose the possibility of someone within that knowledge domain being able to answer the question appropriately.

Those questions run right alongside reading documentation for fun.

I suppose an overhaul to the infrastructure of question answering could help solve this problem - like questions have a maturity cycle / process in which they are developed into a more refined / edited sorts of comprehensive documentation, or even a better 'smarter' way of linking clusters of question together, or a way of moderating the authoritative direction of a question (rather than delete or replace, show a progression of modifications so people can learn what are model questions and what are less useful kinds).

Getting people to stop asking kinds of questions will never work, because they ask those questions precisely because they have not been trained in any sorts of formal internet etiquette. If you want to prevent the community from collapsing in on itself, I think the best solution is to modify the flow and connectivity of questions, so that they are intelligently inter-related, rather than relying on a sort of competitive singular universal form.

Also you give no reasons as to why your preferred way of asking questions is superior other than stating as a fact that "SO would be better served" by it.

That is an extremely good and useful question. It is called the bottom up approach. The fact that it might or might not be asked generally, has nothing to do with what we should do the times it is asked.