The post was closed for being a software recommendation. At the time the question was asked, we hadn't settled on that rule. Nobody can fault you for violating a rule that didn't exist. But we realized that recommendation questions aren't nearly as useful as other questions - they tend to go out of date quickly, and they attract low-quality, link-only answers. Relevant: Since when are software recommendations off-topic? So we went back and cleaned up lots of these questions.

As you said, though, plenty of software rec questions can be trivially rephrased from "what software does X?" to "how do I do X?". For an answer to be useful, it has to explain how to use the software to accomplish the task: How do I recommend software in my answers? There are still recommendation questions that can't be asked, like "I want a browser that does X, Y, and Z, and is free", because that's not a task.

Closed questions that provide no value may be deleted. A case could be made that the answers to yours did not, and I would agree: they just linked to the product and/or its documentation and didn't explain how to use it in the answer itself. (Links tend to go bad over time.) But that's a reason to delete the answer, not the question. This question was easily salvageable and, in my opinion, didn't deserve swift deletion. If there was a wildly popular "what's your favorite computer joke?" question with a bunch of answers, that would very much call for complete removal, but one that has a potential to be actually useful to someone in and of itself should survive.

The post was closed for being a software recommendation. At the time the question was asked, we hadn't settled on that rule. Nobody can fault you for violating a rule that didn't exist. But we realized that recommendation questions aren't nearly as useful as other questions - they tend to go out of date quickly, and they attract low-quality, link-only answers. Relevant: Since when are software recommendations off-topic? So we went back and cleaned up lots of these questions.

As you said, though, plenty of software rec questions can be trivially rephrased from "what software does X?" to "how do I do X?". For an answer to be useful, it has to explain how to use the software to accomplish the task: How do I recommend software in my answers? There are still recommendation questions that can't be asked, like "I want a browser that does X, Y, and Z, and is free", because that's not a task.

Closed questions that provide no value may be deleted. A case could be made that the answers to yours did not, and I would agree: they just linked to the product and/or its documentation and didn't explain how to use it in the answer itself. (Links tend to go bad over time.) But that's a reason to delete the answer, not the question. This question was easily salvageable and, in my opinion, didn't deserve swift deletion. If there was a wildly popular "what's your favorite computer joke?" question with a bunch of answers, that would very much call for complete removal, but one that has a potential to be actually useful to someone in and of itself should survive.