Programming

With over 1000 rep on Stack Overflow, you should have access to the First Posts and Late Answers review queues where you can get an idea of well, give it a try to see what's in there. There's a fair bit of people trying to sneak links into new answers to old questions (Late Answers) that having another set of eyes on would help catch before they get too far. Likewise, there's a lot of posts to First Posts where someone could help a new user and take the time to help them make their question better... or if it isn't a good fit for the Q&A format of Stack Overflow flag it for closure.

Those queues were the ones I’m talking about. SO rewards clearing your queue of 40 per day for each queue (maybe that’s different if you have more rep).

Without the gamification of the badges, the participation in community moderation and curation of the material would likely be even less active.

I very much doubt that. Forums for helping others existed for decades before SO and even now a lot of stuff has moved to discord, Reddit, Zulip, and slack and they still have moderation and most people actually get answers to their questions.