I’ve done some research after posting the OP, by which I mean watching a few YT videos of people who have looked into the matter. It seems the founder was insistent that the site not become another Yahoo answers, so the process of asking a question was made to be high friction in order to improve the signal to noise ratio for people looking up answers later, such as with google.

While they succeeded in not becoming another Yahoo Answers, they’ve instead become so impenetrable as to be useless. It got to the point I’d avoid clicking on SO when it came up in search results because I figured the question wouldn’t be answered anyway, so they ended up not making the experience better for future googlers after all.