do you agree with the conclusion that "Stack Overflow is almost dead"?
No. Traffic is declining, but I don't think it's at that point say "almost dead". There still are quite a few questions coming in, and users contributing useful content (including new contributors).
Do you agree with that the rise of LLMs, and SO feeling unwelcome, are the cause?
From what I see people say for themselves on Reddit at least, a significant number of people feel like SO is unwelcome, and like that LLMs don't make them feel that way when they have questions. I have related-ish thoughts in https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/384378/997587.
Is number of new questions the right metric for "life" or "death" of SO?
I think it should be part of whatever metric that is. I'd want voting activity to be considered too. Even if we somehow answer every question under the sun, as long as there are people in the field of software development, voting activity gives some picture of how many of those people encounter this platform and find its content useful. "How reusable is our content?" That's part of the core goal here.
For me right now, I think SO is dead when the people who are looking for what we're designed to provide (a community-built library of Q&A) no longer find us able to provide that.
Or otherwise, if nobody finds this platform/library useful for anything. I'm referring to reddit a lot (apologies), but I think it's worth doing since in my mind, they represent the masses, and on reddit threads that discuss declines in SO traffic, it's common to see a highly voted comment saying something like "but if SO dies, who will feed the LLMs?". Of course, we're not the only ones who do, but I suppose even if people hardly use SO directly, what we do can still contribute to making the world a better place... ? I'll leave a question mark there since I don't know if I can really stand behind LLMs as a "frontend" to SO making the world a better place (environmental impacts and all that).
Tangent: voting really matters. The other complaint I see a lot on reddit is about outdated information being the top answers. Ideally, voting means that the most useful stuff is at the top. Is it that these people aren't voting? If so, why? Is it that they can't vote? Or enough of them can't vote to change the sort order? These are questions I think are important to engage with. I'll take the liberty here to plug some of my thoughts about voting like I usually do: https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/386224/997587, Add an option to sort answers by the viewer's previously cast votes, https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/393604/997587.
Apologies for the rambling.