In the good old *nix days the system provided pretty much everything you needed: C, perl, man pages, and well documented header files. Throw in a couple of good books on programming, and you could do a lot.

That's still the case, but it feels like today's software development reality is different. There are endless frameworks, apis, devops methods, scalability concerns, and n+1 standards with which to integrate and keep up to date on. Knowing your language is only about 25% of the battle, and few projects are developed in a vacuum.

It's not possible to keep track of all those things, so endless internet searches are the end result.