There needs to be rules on what can and can't be posted, otherwise, there's no reason for communities, and we'd all need to just search a big bucket for whatever we were interested in, or just scroll forever.

That said, yeah, a question community should allow any type of question, and if over time, the "how do I..." questions take over, then so be it. This becomes help community, because that's what the people want.

Upvoting and downvoting should be enough for the people to decide what they want for their community. It should not be so heavily guarded by mods. Moderation, not dictation.

Piefed’s new “block posts in a subscribed instance by tag” feature could be a really useful thing for this if it spreads to lemmy and mbin, so that posts like these can be tagged “help” or something and people who are happy with rule 5 can block them

I think they could specify rule five to disallow questions that would be answered on the first page of any search engine or on the Q&A on the relevant site, but more complex questions like this should be allowed.

But I guess it's easier to have a strict rule and look the other way/allow some posts to break it as long as no one complains, rather than to have loose/non-specific rules and constant arguments with OP+community about which side every post falls on and have to make a different judgement call for every complaint.