@nhouser9 if those thousands of duplicates have links that point future visitors to the correct question with a good answer, how does that make it so "no one can find anything"? To get from a dupe to the dupe target is clicking a link. To get from an unsatisfactorily answered question to a more helpful question is going back to your search page and hoping the results contain something relevant. Or relying on the automagic "relevant questions" sidebar. Or hoping that someone left a comment with a link. See SO for examples of how well that works out.

Why does closing questions "hurt the asker"? Closure is not permanent, we can reopen dupe closed questions just as easily as those closed for non-dupe reasons if the OP edits their post to make it clear why it is not a dupe. Speaking anecdotally, I VTC a lot of this weekend's pokemon go questions as dupes of the various "i cannot login" ones, as best as I could match symptoms. If the VTC as dupe was unavailable, I would have closed most of them as too broad or unclear instead, so I don't see how taking the dupe option away helps those askers.

@Studoku depends on the exact issue, but here are some recent popular ones: my account reset with latest update, here is my username, i dunno my email address, i dont remember my password

We could pop it up in huge, bright red letters and users would still skip it like they do all EULAs and other website popups

I have 143 for the week as well

WITNESS ME (watch this movie during movie night)

This seems like it should be on meta.se instead of just meta.arqade

@Alex the reasons for a suspension are private between the mods and the user

@Alex no worries, i'm glad its not a bug :D

2k+ editors still make progress on badges in the copy editor chain. I'm not saying that it was the motivator in this particular case, but 2k+ editors do have something to gain from making edits.