The voting system and accepted answers tools also fail to account for time and always have. A highly voted, accepted answer five years ago might be very wrong today because the frameworks changed or best practices shifted or all sorts of other reasons. There's fundamentally no concept of "these votes are stale over time" or "the accepted answer has changed". There's technically no concept of "this question was asked 4 years, but seems stale, can I get fresh answers?" and in practice a direct antagonism against trying that given the incentives among certain parts of the moderator culture to "close all duplicates quickly".
Many good responders and some of the better heavy handed mods work around the lack of tools for dealing with time with a constant stream of "Update:" and "Update to the Update:" top-level edits to the "accepted answer", but that isn't universal and requires manual intervention, only encourages heavy-handed moderators that heavy-handedness is the "right" approach versus a light touch, ignores what the over-gamified voting system was supposed to represent as the concept of an "answer", and overall sometimes just makes answers look "sloppy" rather than "idempotent".
I think the "moderator capture" by heavy-handed moderators seems an inevitable consequence of the "game" mechanics, where some of the tools have been lacking, and the sorts of people prone to undervaluing their own labor on behalf of companies incentivizing them with "points" over wages. I think the increasing feel of "StackOverflow is stale" is directly for not having time mechanics and a way to refresh answers from time to time as technology changes or shifts. The parts of "StackOverflow" that are as close to "evergreen" as possible are continually edited mini-wikis in a sloppy 90s top-posting USENET thread style that is messy and requires both heavy-handed moderation and works around the tools and the concept that an answer has a single author rather than is enabled by the tools.
ETA: Time in both directions, too: sometimes you are stuck in a legacy codebase and need to know "what was the accepted answer to this question 5 years ago?" and want easier tools to wade through legacy answers than trying to archeology dive through years of poorly organized Wiki editing history and comment history scattered across a N answers and M comments to each answer and/or hope that someone preserved somewhere in the middle of the top-posting thread in the current wiki state.
Many good responders and some of the better heavy handed mods work around the lack of tools for dealing with time with a constant stream of "Update:" and "Update to the Update:" top-level edits to the "accepted answer", but that isn't universal and requires manual intervention, only encourages heavy-handed moderators that heavy-handedness is the "right" approach versus a light touch, ignores what the over-gamified voting system was supposed to represent as the concept of an "answer", and overall sometimes just makes answers look "sloppy" rather than "idempotent".
I think the "moderator capture" by heavy-handed moderators seems an inevitable consequence of the "game" mechanics, where some of the tools have been lacking, and the sorts of people prone to undervaluing their own labor on behalf of companies incentivizing them with "points" over wages. I think the increasing feel of "StackOverflow is stale" is directly for not having time mechanics and a way to refresh answers from time to time as technology changes or shifts. The parts of "StackOverflow" that are as close to "evergreen" as possible are continually edited mini-wikis in a sloppy 90s top-posting USENET thread style that is messy and requires both heavy-handed moderation and works around the tools and the concept that an answer has a single author rather than is enabled by the tools.
ETA: Time in both directions, too: sometimes you are stuck in a legacy codebase and need to know "what was the accepted answer to this question 5 years ago?" and want easier tools to wade through legacy answers than trying to archeology dive through years of poorly organized Wiki editing history and comment history scattered across a N answers and M comments to each answer and/or hope that someone preserved somewhere in the middle of the top-posting thread in the current wiki state.