Is voting to close of this question warranted or at least defensible, or was this a bit reckless?

Question

The question What were some of the first two stage rockets flown? has just been put on hold as duplicate to When did the concept of “stages” enter rocketry?.

I feel this was a bit of reckless voting, and needless holding.

The first clue might be that the held question asks for some specific rockets, the "dupe" asks for a historical date.

Viewing the proposed "duplicate" we see there are four answers.

• ancient Chinese fireworks
• historical writings of Konstantin Tsiolkovsy
• writings of Cyrano de Bergerac

and finally an answer by @Uwe, who is also the OP of the held question in question:

• Theoretical work of four individuals + Bumper Sputnik and Vostok

However, the rockets briefly mentioned here are already cited in @Uwe's question, and so are clearly not also the answer to it!

A careful reading of the question might indicate that the title doesn't match the body of the question well, and so a helpful comment asking for some alignment or clarification would be warranted.

But is closing as duplicate really warranted in this case since the question cites as examples the only rockets (other than Chinese fireworks) that happen to be mentioned (also by the OP) in one of the answers of the proposed duplicate?

Answer 1

Please note that the question has been substantially altered since voting it as a duplicate.Take a look at the edit history.

At the time of voting it as duplicate, the titular question was "What were some of the first two stage rockets flown?". The literal answer to that is that according to accepted scientific knowledge, this was an ancient chinese ballistic cruise missile from the 14th century CE. Calling these accounts fictional as happened in a comment is unwarranted.

The body of the question doesn't change this much. Its not unusual for people to underestimate rocketry by a few centuries, so that research into the titular question only concerned work from the 20th century did not seem to be of much relevance to me. When researching two-stage rockets, I was like "Wait, I have already read and answered this question, and the research in the OP is off by a few centuries" and came back to my older answer, which at the time fit perfectly also for that question. Hence I voted them as a duplicate.

A comment to the age of the questions:

My question is different to " When did the concept of “stages” enter rocketry?" and was asked earlier, Nov 30 2017

It is not unusual to close older questions as duplicates of newer ones if the newer question has better answers.

Enough people thought the question as asked was similar enough to the duplicate to close it, so clearly I wasn't the only one who thought so.

The question "What were some of the first two stage rockets flown?" is fundamentally different then the question "Was the R-7 the first two stage rocket of the Soviet Union?". It is not surprising that such a substantial edit makes the question no longer appear a duplicate.

So yes, after those edits, I do not longer believe them to be a duplicate.

But I still believe there is a problem with goalpost moving. Edits should not fundamentally change questions. Because then we end up in exactly this situation - answers get invalidated, as do duplicates. This is not the first question that has had such extensive changes to it. So I would like to utter a word of caution that edits that change the intent of questions are somewhat discouraged because they exhibit the exact problems we see here.

Answer 2

A helpful comment to an active OP is all that's necessary here. Voting to close is not warranted. It makes a lot of work for other users.

In this case as soon as it was called to @Uwe's attention the already-well-received question was edited and things have proceeded nicely.

Every tool in SE has it's own benefits and drawbacks, helpful comments have the best benefit to side-effect ratio, so we should try to start there first whenever possible.