It was not. A lot of the questions that would now be rejected for “subjectivity” were initially allowed, then at some point migrated to a separate instance, called “programmers.stackexchange.com” and deleted from the main site. Of course, over time, even that website lost the community and was later renamed to https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/ and became the same kind of hostile hellhole.

The fact that you added “for good reason” implies that you agree with the sentiment that the website shouldn't have a community that socializes, so I'm not surprised that you tuned it out and didn't notice it being driven off the website. From your perspective this may be a case of “good riddance”, but for many including myself, it was quite sad (and still is).