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## Subtle difference, big change
The difference between what we have now (a group of distinct communities) and what you propose (a single community with filters) seems subtle, but I believe the long term results would differ more than might be expected.

## Communities are self governed
Each community decides through community consensus on its local Meta whether to go ahead with any changes. A community can decide to have different categories, different rules, customisations of the site appearance and additional capabilities (being open source means anyone can implement these).

If Codidact were to be merged into a single community with filters for different topics, this would be a change to every existing community, so it would require agreement on every local Meta. I don't know whether you would get this agreement, but I personally would be opposed. My objection would not only be based on losing the customisations, but also my concerns about the loss of the benefits of a focused community.

## Self contained communities
In a distinct community, voting can include some votes from people visiting out of interest, but in most cases will be votes from a community of people with a particular focus on that topic. This will tend to be a mixture of experts and people who have frequent interaction with that topic, so the voting will give a better measure of the questions and answers than the voting in a generic community covering all topics.

A distinct community can also have community-specific rules and guidelines on its local Meta site, which may not fit with other communities. Although it's tempting to seek a single best approach for everyone, in practice this tends to leave everyone in a state of compromise. Different communities benefit from different levels of rigor and formality, and different rules about what is welcome on the site, beyond just a subject area.

These are just my personal opinions, but there are existing examples of generic Q&A sites with no topic restriction, and I don't get the impression that they lead to high quality.