This probably has more to do with the environment that these developers learned to code in. Stack Overflow was a huge part of my journey as a programmer, but their journey probably included more reference books and colleagues.
My programming journey started more than a decade before Stack Overflow came into existence, but Stack Overflow-style forums were always a very big part of it, so the concept is certainly not new to me.
I've found some utility in the site when I want to see a quick API reference example from a popular library, but find most of the content to be not particularly interesting to me at this stage. I have found that there is minimal content in the subjects I am interested in today, with more dead ends than answers, leaving very little draw to the site for me.
Based on my own history, I feel like if I had started programming when Stack Overflow was an available resource I would still be at the stage where the kind of content on the site would be incredibly fascinating. I used to eat that stuff up like it was going out of style. But at some point you start to see the same patterns and it all begins to feel repetitive, even if the names have changed.
Perhaps people with longer programming histories simply outgrow Stack Overflow? I still turn to it once in a while, but don't see it as the incredible resource many others seem to.
