In one location where I as an inexperienced new user can breathe and find out for myself what's going on without being the next Agatha Christie (or at least a good data visualist).
I can sympathize with this request. To a new user, this whole explosion must look completely bizarre ("SE changed one small feature, and then everyone flipped out and wrote like five different questions about how terrible everything is"). Unfortunately, it's not that easy. The long version of this story is in this MSE post, but in short, it's not one big thing, it's a lot of little things over a very long period of time. More specifically, Stack Exchange the company has repeatedly made announcements both large and small without consulting or warning the community in advance, while (seemingly*) ignoring long-standing feature requests, mostly in the area of content moderation. SE employees have also made a rather large number of public statements which, while well-intentioned, nevertheless undermined our confidence in the company and its employees. Again, this happened repeatedly over a very long period of time and each example will seem trivial on its own.
Many other people have already written lengthy essays about how this is unsustainable, how SE needs to change, how the community needs to change, and so on. This will not be another of those essays. I think both the problem and the (wide) range of plausible solutions are actually rather obvious once you look at the full history here. It's just a matter of how the company chooses to move forward. Unfortunately, it is apparent to me that the community does not have the practical ability to affect how we move forward. I write this not as an indictment of Stack Exchange the company, but as an acknowledgement of the reality of the situation. We can't fix this. They have to do so, one way or another. Fortunately, they are making an effort at improving the situation. Time will tell.
* In their defense, their bug tracker is not public, and we don't actually know what they are working on at any given time.