> how do you know they didn't just plug it into chatGPT

If someone can present a good solution and talk about the reasoning behind it with enough detail & savvy to convince you that they actually wrote it, does it matter if they didn't?

The logical conclusion of this line of thought is to just outsource to the cheapest foreign firm who can operate a chatbot.

That presumes that someone using a chatbot would necessarily generate a high quality solution and be able to explain the underlying reasoning.

And that is my point: there's a difference between someone pushing forth slop, and someone who is simply not doing the actual labor but could if they wanted to do so.