The topics that are not new to me and are of interest come up after its training-dataset-cutoff, thus it can produce bogus information.

I think ChatGPT and the likes should be thought of as cartographers who when probed can provide an outline of regions of the knowledge space and give hints as to what could be useful.

Given then a high level but also imprecise map, I can ask the GPS for clarity as to where I am going.

The problem is that I often don't know where that is and thus I don't know what to ask from the GPS, but I can describe it to the cartographer, and they can draw a map for me.

In this analogy, the GPS is search engines / books / papers.

No, it's objectively shit for a lot of things. The more technical and abstract something is in its concepts, the worse it becomes. It is just an LLM and that means it is inappropriate by its very nature for most things.