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You don't need much of anything, it's just another tool to help people figure stuff out. If you've already invested the time in reading through the manuals for these tools then maybe you don't get much out of something like ChatGPT, but consider that there's thousands of new people entering the industry every year and the number of tools which they're expected to learn to use has increased over time.

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It's fine when you've read the man page at least once. If you just cowboy your way through every task, you'll never even be aware of what your tools can do. Which results in comments we've all seen: "I can't believe curl/Firefox/vim/readline/whatever can do something like that!" about something so trivial that every good poweruser/sysadmin has known it for decades (because it's in the man page).

Sure, but that's knowledge you pick up over years. You can't reasonably expect people to frontload all of it on the first pass with every single tool they interact with, especially when starting off.

I've read through most of the man pages of every tool I use at least once, but it has taken me years, and I've done it incrementally.

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