For what? I've already built up the internal momentum to go out of my way to fix someone being wrong about something trivial on the internet, and now you're telling me I need to invest my time on even more trivial pedantic bullshit (like editing wording on an accepted answer) just to gain the privilege to make a top level answer?

You'd think that with such strict rules, StackOverflow would have very high quality questions and very high quality answers. But it actually doesn't. One aspect of being a good developer is catching a stackoverflow answer in a mistake and being capable of rejudging the rest of the answer section as a result (ie: scrolling further down and finding the correct answer that has zero upvotes).

You'll notice that anyone can write an answer (or ask a a question) with zero interference. There is no rep barrier to contributing an answer.

If you want to participate in other ways without answering or asking questions then there are still ways to do that.

Was it always this way? It's been a few years since I last gave it a shot.

Yes, since the very start. I'm 95% sure. That's been the big selling point from what I can remember: there is a very low barrier to entry (make an account)

Then I must be misremembering, but I'm unsure how. I'm sure that I've had the experience of wanting to contribute to SO to correct bad information and being unable to do so due to low karma, and that was enough to keep me off the site.

A lot of people want to treat SO as a forum and instead of contributing an answer with the right information try to comment on a post.

Many times, people try answering questions in comments when they're unsure of an answer rather than trying to say "this is the answer" and create an answer of their own that is sufficiently in depth to be helpful to others.

Other times, new users try to ask questions on the comments of "I'm having this problem too, do you have a solution yet?" or, while they do try to ask for clarification on the question - do so on questions that are stale.

Lastly, comments were often (in the days of 0 rep comment permissions) targets of spam that could go undiscovered.

The way that SO decided to solve these problems was to add a bit of friction to leaving a comment. This meant that users who were trying to contribute answers were directed to answers; users who were trying to ask questions on stale content would... get frustrated and go to a question where there is sufficient information; and automated spam would be that much harder (requiring an investment of time from the spammer).

It's not an ideal solution, but from the standpoint of a site with volunteers curating and moderating the content, creates fewer problems for the people who invest the time than other solutions do. Burning out those people who invest the time is one of the things that has concerned people in the company concerned about the existing community - losing them would have SO devolve into something that more closely resembled the software development section of Yahoo answers... or https://www.answers.com/t/computer-programming

I don't get it really but I think a lot of people have a similar experience. So while technically you are allowed to post an answer/question the moment you join there must be something else standing in the way. I don't know what that could be but so many people wouldn't complain if there wasn't something.