But what would be the point? There is no SEO to game, no people to influence etc.

There's plenty of influence plays there. If I worked for Cloud Provider X, I might nudge people toward using that cloud instead of a competitor. If I'm a developer of Software Y, I might say "Software Y makes this much easier" and boost sales.

Maybe, but that would require an actually helpful answer, other than that no body is going to look or care about your answer.

Quora is plagued with these "helpful" answers

Don't give them any ideas.

Semi-related: Someone wrote a sort algorithm that searches StackOverflow for sorting functions and runs them until it returns the correct answer.

https://gkoberger.github.io/stacksort/

Inspired by:

http://xkcd.com/1185/