I used to be heavily active in curating SO, and yes, there is an incredibly strong sense of alienation from the corporation (which is what drove me away).

In the old days, most of the staff, from devs to management to the CEO, were active users of the site and hung out on Meta and in chat. They were easy to reach and happy to answer questions; and whenever they made major changes to the site they would go to Meta to ask for feedback and adjust their plans accordingly.

There was a noticeable shift in this dynamic starting around ~2016. Around this time, the company stopped focusing development effort on the core site functionality, and instead prioritized side products & attempts to monetize the site (most of which failed). Feature requests on Meta were almost completely ignored, and site features that had been on previously-announced timelines/roadmaps were never delivered. But the community was still as strong as ever; and so people started implementing these missing features themselves in the form of bots and userscripts. This was the "golden age" of moderation bots, and a really fun time to be a part of the community -- power users ran heavily modified frontends that could display all kinds of additional information and automate repetitive actions, and integrate with bots to do things that Stack Exchange's systems were bad at -- like flagging spam and low-quality posts; identifying plagiarism; and detecting flamewars in comments.

As the company grew, they hired a ton of middle management who were not active participants in the site, and largely did not care about the day-to-day. This was alright when they left us alone, but around 2018-2019 they began to take an openly hostile stance towards the "power users". Here's an excellent post from that time summarizing the general sentiment: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/331513

The short version is: the company began blaming power users for things like the site's "unwelcoming" reputation (which is really a symptom of the site's outdated and opaque moderation tooling, and power users had been clamoring for better tools for years). They began a pattern of rolling out features and UI changes that took major steps backwards in usability and accessibility -- and due to all the negative feedback these changes received on Meta, they announced staff would no longer participate on Meta because it was "too negative". A high-level manager famously quipped that the opinion of Meta was not relevant as it represented "0.015%" of Stack Exchange's userbase -- despite the fact that that 0.015% was responsible for the majority of content & moderation activity contributed to the site.

In late 2019 it got a whole lot worse when, in rapid succession: 1) the company updated the site terms-of-service to illegally change the license of user-submitted content, and 2) an employee abruptly revoked a volunteer's moderation privileges without due process, and then went to news outlets making false accusations about that user's behavior (https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333965). Shortly after that, Stack Overflow fired several well-loved and highly respected staff moderators, for undisclosed reasons (https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/342039/). A lot of people, including myself, left the community in the wake of this.

Since then -- at least from my outsider perspective of checking in once in a while to see what's going on -- it seemed for a while like the company was learning from its mistakes.They apologized for ignoring Meta, began asking for and listening to community feedback once again, created new policies to protect volunteers from the kind of abuse that happened in 2019, and began implementing some of those long-ignored and long-overdue feature requests. But in 2021 the company got bought out by a VC firm that is even more aggressive about trying to monetize the site; they started cranking up advertising and pushing generally unwanted side products, but they mostly left the community alone.

That brings us to generative AI. As soon as ChatGPT came out, a deluge of users began copy/pasting Stack Overflow questions into ChatGPT and copy/pasting its answers into the answer box (usually with no editing or fact-checking effort). General consensus among the community seems to be that ChatGPT produces wrong or unhelpful information to an unacceptable degree, and that allowing machine-generated content on Stack Overflow defeats the purpose of the site (you go to ChatGPT if you want answers from a machine, but you go to SO if you want answers from a human). The staff supported this consensus and made it official policy -- but at the same time the CEO kept making rambling blog posts about how "AI is the future about Stack Overflow" and launching sweeping initiatives within the company to do...AI related things? Nobody really knows what he's talking about.

That all leads up to the events that triggered strike: out of nowhere, the company suddenly announced a few days ago that it was overruling previous community consensus and prohibiting users from deleting content on the basis of being AI-generated.