Very well put. Except they didn't think they were "picking a forum format". Forums with that style of voting were still kinda rare at the time (Reddit was young at SO's date of creation) and the Q&A formatting was supposed to look intentionally different from a "thread", which is also way (at least in the original design) comments were de-emphasized, and moderation policy held that the large majority of comments could be deleted at any time.

Unfortunately, this design comes across to a lot of people as comments being threaded replies, and the "question" format as privileging the OP (which makes it that much worse when the system forces question closure to happen out in the open). And recent redesigns, by new ownership obsessed with "engagement" and profitability and apparent complete apathy towards the original goals, have thoroughly enshittified the original.

I also have no idea what you mean about

> for example apparently not taking into account that software with identical name can have different versions;

There were always separate tags for various minor versions of Python, for example, and they were commonly incorrectly applied to questions where the version was not relevant.