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I would say it depends, by generally yes. Besides, closing requires 5 different people to vote on it. If none were able to salvage the post, then it would probably be worth closing it. For example, the second question you linked has been salvaged, and it's much clearer. Although it may be an XY problem, it is clear what the OP is trying to achieve.
Perhaps the best thing to do is ignore 1 rep people until the page layout is improved. This is exactly why the "accept rate" metric was removed since it had this exact effect on people. I hope people are still not doing this nowadays. :(
I agree with @Zanna, I even asked a similar question a couple of years ago, albeit in a completely opposite way though :p meta.askubuntu.com/questions/18490/…. I just want to add that the duplicate you linked is from a long time ago in a time when accepting answers actually mattered due to a metric that showed called "Accept Rate". This used to cause new users and users with low accept rates as they used to get ignored by answerers as they believed they will not get the 15 rep and such.
Just a guess, but it may be that all the meta sites use the same template and are not customizable like the main sites are. But it should probably be added though since the Ubuntu logo is being used as you mentioned.
Thomas did explain why he was proposing this in the question. Moderators do not decide rules. The community does. Moderators help, well, moderate. Your post is sort of turning this into a conspiracy, lol. The short explanation is that Canonical had recently [sort of] redefined EOL, and the community was not in sync with what should be closed as EOL. There was quite a bit of discussion around this, for example, meta.askubuntu.com/questions/19616/…. I don't see the need for making this more bureaucratic than it already is.
"My understanding is that AU now has plans to phase out old obsolete questions." What do you mean by that and where has this been mentioned. Personally, I'm against closing old questions simply because our review queues are too long and we don't have enough people reviewing to keep up. Pushing old questions to the queue will be a big problem as they can overshadow more recent posts.
I don't know anything about CAELinux, so I'll keep this as a comment. It's not about which DE the flavour use. It's more about the extra or different repositories they offer. I'll take Mint as an example. Mint offers 3 different DEs: Cinnamon, Xfce, and MATE. But that's not why it is not supported. It's because Mint uses its own PPAs. So questions related to Mint will not be supported here as they will likely be related to modifications made exclusively in the Mint PPAs.
