There is nothing noble about search over and above AI answers. It's just an outdated way of delivering answers but massively impaired because the technology didn't fully exist. Imagine you went to your doctor to ask a medical question and she gave you a list of books to research and to formulate your answer that way.
I spent an hour debugging my networking setup and I just turned on voice mode and used ChatGPT to help me figure out why everything was working except my networking equipment wasn't changing IP addresses when I set it. As it answered my questions, it gave thoughtful answers and explained everything along the way to the point where I started to guess that I needed to upgrade my control plane, and lo and behold, that was the answer. If I had to peruse through links just for the false idea that I would be getting a cognitive benefit, I might have spent 4x the amount of time or given up.
I'm very happy that we are living in an where we can get reliable answers immediately and move on to what we want to do.
Your example sounds like a different case than what OP outlines since you know enough to reach the conclusion in the end.
An extreme example, but what happens if Bob Nottechnical follows GPT instructions which happen to include `sudo rm -rf /`? How would Bob know to stop trusting the instructions when every time he's followed things before it worked as expected?
ChatGPT can lead you to an answer. It can also lead you in circles never getting anywhere and it's taken some getting used to figuring out on which path you currently are.
So for now I'm doing both. A bit search and a bit AI.