It seems nobody has mentioned yet an important manifestation of the problem you seem to be talking about: Hot Network Questions (though I don't think this is the case in the specific example you linked to). When a question is deemed "hot" by the Algorithms That Be, it gets placed in that list, basking in the attention of the entire Stack Exchange network. The massive inflow of viewers who more often than not have little to no domain knowledge will produce weird voting patterns.
In particular, the simpler the better. Elaborate questions about niche features of a language will never get as much votes as the umpteenth duplicate for something pretty basic. If you have a combination of simple but superficially nontrivial question with a simple answer, all those people coming from the HNQ list will go "Oh, neat!" and upvote. My long-standing experience is that a lot of the HNQ posts on Stack Overflow are duplicates, or just not very good. But very good questions/answers don't get enough views to go hot, and even if they did they wouldn't be appriciated by a wide enough audience to cause extreme voting.