I think without Sci-hub I might have just said "fuck it" and never read certain papers from smaller journals that I later wound up citing

One thing I would do a lot with Google Scholar is find a highly-cited, somewhat recent (past decade or so) paper and then click into its citations to find the very most recent related work. IIRC this interface was chronological so there was no big-journal bias and I found a lot of stuff in random journals. Low-friction quality-filtering through SciHub was very helpful for me in this process.

I worked in a theoretical field, so it's actually possible to assess the quality of a paper just by reading it. If you're doing something experimental you may have to lean on the big-journal filter a little bit more.