Your comment has a lot of merit and more people should take this approach/view

I dont think it is the same, or at least that is not my experience of using SO. Typically using involved usually requires me synthesising answers, getting a better understand of my issue in order to search/evaluate the answers I need. With an LLM I can be much more vague, and the amount of mental effort I have to spend to get to some "working" code is much less and does not require me understand as many things. Even if I did not understand fully what a piece of code from SO did, it was usually at worst a piece of code that I still needed to integrade inside a function etc. I doubt you could get into having any interesting enough working up simply by copy pasting code from SO. Now I can copy paste entire functions and code files from an LLM.