I feel they never truly recovered moderator goodwill after that fiasco months ago so they tried to promote more people into doing it, me included (1.3k to 2.1k reputation overnight)

Apparently it didn't work (I'll not edit people's questions!) so now they'll try automating it. Good luck to them but I'm not seeing them succeed in an area where nobody has.

And, as others said, SO isn't the same as before. It's mostly a homework finder and it doesn't encourage newer versions of code.