I think there’s a range of how people read questions that stretches from “The question asks this and that is what answers should limit themselves to” to “The question asks this, but I think they really want to know that”.
In your first example the question states:
Question: Should I just never update my LinkedIn profile for the next year or two (i.e. so my soon-to-be-ex-employer doesn't figure out where I'm going). This is stressing me out, and I don't have the money for a drawn-out legal battle.
A very literally-minded person would read that as someone asking for personal advice that is out of scope for a Stack Exchange site. Someone from the other end of the range might ignore that and see the question as asking “What can be done to prevent a vindictive ex-employer from contacting my new employer to cause trouble for me?” and interpret it as on-topic.
It’s a difference of opinion, not a matter of who is right and who is wrong, and as a very literally-minded person, I can tell you right now there is no change of wording of the guidelines or close reasons that will magically make folks like me interpret questions loosely enough to satisfy someone at the other end of the range. The only solution is to edit the question so it more clearly matches the on-topic intent of the author.
Community members also prioritize helping people asking questions and our mission to collaboratively create a reference of knowledge differently, which may make some of us more tolerant of interesting questions that aren’t exactly on-topic, and some of us more focused on keeping sort of off-topic questions from stealing resources from obviously on-topic questions.
It’s frustrating for everyone involved when people disagree on what is best for the site. Compromise is hard, especially when one side is focused on more abstract long term “good” and the other is focused on more tangible immediate “good”. We just have to focus on the fact almost all of us are trying to do “good”.
I don’t vote to close questions that seem off-topic to me, but which have already attracted answers with useful information. I know my tendencies toward literalness and try to remind myself that the goal here is to gather knowledge, not close questions. If an off-topic question elicits good objective answers from people who interpreted it differently from the way I did, then trying to impose my interpretation after the fact doesn’t seem constructive.
If a question is attracting the sort of answers that the close reasons are there to try to prevent, I feel obligated to vote to close, and I would hope that someone who might be leaning toward “on-topic” but can see it’s not clearcut, would support or not oppose closing the question with an eye toward bringing the question more clearly on-topic and reopening it.
