I don't know.

Each of us must do a cost/benefit analysis. The costs of staying have to do with how much aversion we feel towards supporting, however trivially, SE the company. The benefits of staying are how much we gain from our participation that cannot be gained in another way.

I too am a recreational user. I stumbled upon SE at a very bad time in my life, and it was better than tranquilizers in taking my mind off my problems. Then, like tranquilizers, it became a habit. I learned a great deal. For example, I came to terms with singular they nearly four years ago through an answer I saw on English Language and Usage, and that, coupled with what I learned about the changing nature of English made it easy for me to accept the more recent expanded meaning of singular they. Material I read on ELU also confirmed that one can be turned off by the neopronouns without in any way being turned off by their adherents.

The above was basically my answer to the earlier question Why do You Stay?

But that was then, which seems like a very long time ago. Much has happened, and I much of it has been disgusting. I am now repelled by the thought of continuing, but, (a) I have a habit to kick, and (b) I still have a kernel of hope that this mess can be resolved in a way that will wash much of the bad taste out of my mouth.

If not, will I be able to kick my habit? I don't know. There is one site that means more to me than any of the others (The Great Outdoors - TGO), because (a) through it I can to a small but perceptible extent relive my backpacking years, now inevitably coming to an end; and (b) because I feel more of an attachment to its users than to the users of the other sites; and (c) because long experience in The Great Outdoors means that I can make a non-trivial contribution to other users.

But I don't know.

To improve the communities you're a part of.

The direct incentive is clear: to help others with their questions, and be helped with yours. It's pretty much the same incentive you have on any Q&A website. To the extent that the site continues to enable that, you can use it for that purpose. But your underlying question is more about why you should do that here instead of on another site.

Some sites might be more affected or less affected by the recent drama than others. Personally, as a mod of RPG.SE, I do what I do to make my part of the community a better place not out of some loyalty to Stack Exchange as a company or platform, but out of a desire to help the community I am a part of be a better place - both for asking and answering questions (on main site), and for making it a friendly and welcoming place for anyone who's part of the hobby (in chat).

That's not to say I don't have complaints about how things have played out. But one important reason I and other mods have stayed on - or come back after suspending our activity - is because we care about our communities, even if the platform they're hosted on acts in ways we strongly disagree with. I assume many longtime users have had the same considerations, though obviously there's less "tying you down" to Stack Exchange if you're not a diamond moderator.

Obviously, everyone's threshold for where they draw the line - and what is just a step too far for them to bear - is different. But I think this is fundamentally the main think you have to think about when you decide whether you want to continue contributing to sites on Stack Exchange.

You can still participate in the communities of interest to you, while at the same time show your support for transparency and kindness by changing your avatar, username and 'about me' text.

Improving the Community, despite SE, Inc.'s effort to destroy it

I'm mostly active on Information Security, and our current moderation team is down to two people. They're doing a fantastic job at keeping the site as organized as humanly possible, but their powers are limited (as far as I am aware).

As a result, I do my best to help the community. Do my best to be welcoming, to help new users get their questions into shape, to review bad questions and answers, etc.

I'm not doing this for internet points, because after you reach 10k rep there's not really and point to it anyways. I do it because Information Security is a topic dear to me. I want to get better at it and learn from people who know more than me, and I want to share the knowledge I acquired over the years.

I do this not because of Stack Exchange, Inc.'s "support", but despite their best efforts to make the site as hostile as possible for long-time users, by encouraging low-effort one-off posts and discouraging corrective behaviour, which aims to teach new users how the site works and what questions should look like.

Most likely, your goal was never to help Stack Overflow (the company) to begin with.

Simply put, regardless of my thoughts about the company, my incentives haven't changed: they have been, and continue to be, helping myself and other users.

Yours could be similar.

Gamification is still on.

You can still hunt upvotes and badges!

And make no mistake: especially those people, who know about the storm that is shaking the Stack Exchange network these days, understand what it means when a person has invested time and energy to gain reputation.

Meaning: the reputation earned by helping others will not lose value just because Stack Exchange Inc. does such a great job shredding its own reputation.

Is the content useful to you, or not?

There's your incentive. If what you find at SE sites, and the interactions with other users, fulfills your various needs then keep coming back. Do you like helping people with (some SO/SE topic-thing}? Does that make you feel better? Good, keep doing it.

If not, there's a whole 'nother world out there. To badly quote a movie from the 80's ...

The choice, Willow, is yours.

Context for this answer

There are a variety of internet sites (forums and such) that I invested a bit of time in over the years. But in some cases, I woke up one day and realized that they were behaving as time sinks and I was not accruing value. So I left them in my rear view mirror.

Only 1 reason I have now (apart from the general inability to stop coming back to look at the unfolding slow-mo car crash) and that's to have my rep and answers mentioned on my CV for the benefit of potential employers to look at and (hopefully) fawn over.

While SE continues to employ people who have shown such disdain for the users here, I have no other reason to help create the content they rely on.