I enjoyed the architecture astronaut description… I immediately thought of several people from past workplaces that will now eternally be floating high above the earth in space suits when I think of them 
I think that very few companies survive the loss of their founders unless the company culture they leave behind is healthy and they have mentored (looking for a less controversial word than “groomed” here) the person taking over for them to have the same vision for the company’s purpose. As soon as a company stops being led by people who actually use or participate in what it produces, its purpose changes from whatever it was to just making money and showing constant growth. They kill the golden-egg-laying goose because they don’t understand how the goose turns food and affection into gold.
I don’t think Stack Exchange’s upper management really understands how the community turns sand (questions) into pearls (knowledge that everyone wants to use to train their AI). What motivates someone to spend the time to find a question and write a high quality answer to it multiple times a week? Why does having a high reputation on a site have value to someone? I am skeptical replacing human connections with monotone AI generated text is going to make the sites more attractive to answerers, who are, let’s face it, far more valuable in aggregate to the network than the people who only ask questions.
The network shouldn’t aspire to be just another search engine that people dump questions into and get out quick responses of varying usefulness. It is so much more than that. It’s people building international communities to share knowledge and experience. It’s potentially creating a curated library of a huge portion of human knowledge. It’s very sad that the current leadership is chasing page views instead of building something for the future.