The idea that answers should be editable, and the gamification of stackoverflow, was an absolutely terrible combination
At some point the (say 2013-2014 or so) the site deteriorated quite massively, though - as folks considered stackoverflow CV worthy material...
Lordy, that use to piss me off most fiercely. I don’t want someone else’s words attributed to me.
When you join the site, you agree to Terms and Conditions that, among other things, grant a Creative Commons license to the community over your contributions, which gives them the right to make those edits.
The site is explicitly not trying to accommodate people who want to say things in a specific way because it's their way of saying it. The site is explicitly trying to accommodate people who want to collaborate to produce a polished, coherent work of reference. If that isn't you, unironically, that's what tech blogs are for.
People with the attitude you demonstrate here are consistently among the worst-behaved and hardest-to-deal-with participants on the meta site, because of a stubborn refusal to accept a core principle of the site.
(Yes, the reputation system was an unfathomably bad design choice in light of the site's goals. In retrospect I genuinely don't understand how it survived past 2011 or so with tweaks as minor as it got.)
An edit that made a response worse should have knocked the mod down so that they were unable to mod any more. The quality of the edit should have been determined by the original author. "Did this edit make your question better?"
Moderators should have been ranked and scored based on their ability to help and welcome new users. It should have been very costly for them to make a new users feel unwelcome.
Literally everyone on the site is permitted to propose an edit, and everyone with at least 2000 reputation can make unilateral edits. The proposals are approved by a 2 out of 3 majority of random unilateral-edit-privileged users. None of this is considered "moderation" and is not done by "mods". Of millions of Stack Overflow accounts, only a few dozen have ever actually been moderators, and they do a tiny share of curation. Their main job is responding to flags.
> It should have been very costly for them to make a new users feel unwelcome.
The overwhelming majority of people who came to the site wanted the site to be something that it was fundamentally not trying to be, and often something it was fundamentally trying not to be. It was correct to make such users "feel unwelcome", because experience has shown that they typically cannot be reasoned with or explained to. The statistics make it clear that most of them never had any intention of trying to join a community (or, say, ask another question after the one that motivated account creation) in the first place.