Students and Beginners are vital. Without students (who are nascent professionals) and beginning coders (who are ALSO nascent professionals and enthusiasts), the site doesn’t exist.
One doesn’t have to be an ass to make a point here. StackOverflow has been overrun with “make this a safe space” people. Many of those people ARE professionals. But they don’t grasp that the reason StackOverflow is useful (and not the MSDN forums or ExpertsExchange or any of the other hundreds of Q&A sites) is that StackOverflow enforces at least SOME semblance of order.
It used to be impossible to go to SO and post an absolutely incorrect answer without getting some excoriating comments or downvotes. But now every third question I see has a stack of wrong, misleading, and/or outright dangerous answers, because everyone wants to be “nice.”
Bad answers hurt everyone, but thanks to the constant whining about “overbearing moderation,” it is getting harder and harder to deal with the problem.