Bouncing around languages and ecosystems is pretty common, isn't it?

For the average career developer, less common than being stuck with the same legacy code base and language/framework for years.

Yep. A lot of the negative comments seem to come from people who haven’t worked on any new technology/language/framework in years.

Only within startups. Larger corporations have stable toolchains with lifetimes measured in years.

Based on my experience at a very large corporation, not the case. I've had to work on more languages within a year here than any other job I've had.

Almost everyone does search like that, its not about doing something but about finding best and easiest way to do something.

If you mainly deal with 1-3 languages on a daily basis that you have mastered, you don't routinely search for "How do I do xyz in P". Maybe if you're a junior or intermediate developer, or have a poor memory. But doing that frequently is a clear indicator that mastery have yet to been achieved.

It's not wrong or bad to search for help, but it doesn't indicate mastery of the language you're using.

I would say if you work in a narrow domain with a single language then yes, you might not need much searching.

However if you routinely switch among 3-5 languages you will get confused by naming and idiomatic approaches.

Ex: 1. Was it toUpper or upper or upperCase ?

2. What was the most idiomatic way to filter some collection?

3. Was it justify-content and align-items or vice versa?

A good IDE will generally solve first

Presumably copilot should help with second by supplanting search.

Third one I do hope copilot would help there..

I would say not remembering the names of some method is not an indication of lack of mastery.

Even creators of popular libraries and programming languages have admitted they will use search to refresh their memory.

Knowing a language or a tool doesn't mean you will always know the best or the smartest way to do something. This is not necessarily a test of your programming ability. And best practise is more often ever changing. Almost every language or tool is always ever changing and improving itself which best practise also keeps evolving.

Secondly you don't necessarily need to know or master a language or tool for every kind of work. You can just choose to learn as you go along with it, in which case knowing how to search and use the most effective way to do something is very useful.