While I don't remember if and how much I've used it, I have to actively restrict my searches not to give me SO results, but the reference material I am looking for.
So my guess is that SEO is what takes people to SO first, even if it might not get the best results. (And sure, some of that search ranking is due to people recommending it left and right for real: it is actually organic and not fake)
I've long ago accepted that my brain doesn't like learning how most others seem to (I also don't like flowcharts, and prefer dense reference material) — this is not to discredit their way of learning, just recognizing the differences.
I don’t use it often. Before SO, I’d read man pages and still do. But when I want to remember how to do something like sort in awk, seeing an example is a lot faster than than reading the man page again.
You could argue that if I sucked it up and read the man page a few more times, I’d stop needing awk. You’d be right. But I don’t have your aversion to SO, so it’s not so bad for me.
It's not that I hate SO, I just don't find it particularly helpful.
Feels like going to the 13th century catholic church for answers: The answers are as old as they are doctrinal and detached from practical reality, whereas my practical experience is that the honest answer to almost all programming related questions starts with "It depends".
The fact that the medium is set up for each question having a definitive answer just doesn't seem to be a great fit for the open-ended nature of programming questions.
SO is useful for entry level work mostly - topic that I'd be barely familiar with. At some point SO was so prevalent even w/o a search bubble that I had to exclude it from my searches...
