A question like this necessarily solicits either speculation or personal experience, in a way that was already found on Stack Overflow not to work well. I strongly feel that this is not something particular to Stack Overflow culture, but a consequence of the true nature of a technical Q&A site. The point is to avoid discussion, but these kinds of personal takes inevitably invite discussion. (This is also a major problem on Politics Stack Exchange, and a big part of why I'm concerned about the Politics site proposal here, even though I'm interested.)

However, internally asking and answering a question like this seems like something that people might naturally do as part of figuring out a good answer to the other new question that you've linked here. I think this one is simply redundant with that one, and inferior.

That's a fair comment. You obviously have to draw the line somewhere about what is too subjective. I feel like here it is looser than the closest analog, StackOverflow, since we allow software recs for example. But then maybe this is too loose.

I don't mind deleting this if there's a general agreement that it's out of scope. But, FYI https://software.codidact.com/posts/280694 has been up for some time and I feel like this one is not really much worse. I personally have no issue with that question either, but if this one is off topic, it seems like that one should be as well.

That said, why do you feel this is not answerable? For example, if someone posted a large survey of FOSS contributors that looks at this topic, that seems like a pretty objective answer.

I know I've said myself in the question that I'll accept an anecdote, but that's just me compromising for the sake of the currently small user base. I felt like requiring objective answers only is asking too much, and would doom the question to remaining unanswered for years. But if that's really hurting the content quality here, I can take it out. I'm not asking this because I desperately need to hear an answer, any answer :) but more because I thought it could be an interesting discussion and useful knowledge that would motivate visitors to participate more in the site.

Well, I think that we accept library and tool recommendations, but not recommendations for software that would be targeted at end users. :) There has been a fair amount of discussion on Stack Overflow meta recently about whether people are being too strict or pedantic in excluding those sorts of questions, and about where they want to draw the line. I think there's value in having such questions, simply because a person who knows that a library or tool is necessary for a task, won't necessarily have figured out the criteria by which they might be evaluated (or compared to each other).

Regarding the other question, I don't think it's great, and in fact I downvoted it despite that the answers are insightful. I'm not sure how I feel about closing it.

In general, it seems natural that Q&A sites are more generous about topicality and subjectivity when they are new, and become more strict with time.

I don't know if I would call it recent :) I feel like it was all laissez faire until about 2010, and then they decided to really drop the hammer on it between 2011-2012. IMO it's a terrible policy, and many other people think so too, so there's endless attempts at trying to push the line back and reason with mods on meta, but I feel like the core mods are pretty dead set against it.

But then SO is a different site. They're a for profit with commercial goals, so the recommendations would clash with that in a unique way. Also they're corporate enough that there has to be some kind of corporate policy that gets enforced beyond all reason with no room for nuance. But if Codidact is not looking to be an explosive growth startup these don't apply.

If recommendation questions are against the vision of what sort of content CD wants to build, though, that's a different matter.