> Personally I am glad I learnt programming before StackOverflow!

I have not, but at the beginner level you don't really need it, there are tons of tutorials and language documentation that is easier to understand. Also beginners feel absolutely discouraged to ask anything, because even if the question is not a real duplicate, you use all terms wrong and thus get downvoted to hell and then your question is marked as a duplicate to something, that doesn't even answer your question.

Later it's quite nice to ask for clarifications of e.g. the meaning of something specific in a protocol or the behaviour of a particular program. But quite quickly you don't actually get any satisfying answers, so you revert to just read the source code of the actual program and are surprised how easy that actually was. (I mean it's still hard every time you start with a new unknown program, but it's easier than expected.)

Also when you implement a protocol, asking questions on StackOverflow doesn't scale. Not because the time you need to wait for answers; even if that were zero, it still takes to long time and is deeply unsatisfying to develop a holistic enough understanding to write the code. So you start reading the RFCs and quickly appreciate how logically and understandable they are. You first curse how unstructured anything is and then you recognize that the order follows what you need to write and you can just trust the text and write the algorithm down. Then you see that the order in which the protocol is described actually works quite well for async and wonder what the legacy code did, because not deviating from the standard is actually easier.

At some point you don't understand the standard, there will be no answer on StackOverflow, the LLM just agrees with you for every conflicting interpretation you suggest, so you hate everything and start reading other implementations. So no, you still need to figure out a lot for yourself.