It's hard to quantify how much time learning how to search saves because the difference can range between infinite (finding the result vs not finding it at all) to basically no difference (1st result vs 2nd result). I think many people agree it is worth learning how to "properly search" though. You spend much less time searching and you get the results you're looking for much more often. This applies outside of just Google search: learning how to find and lookup information is a useful skill in and of itself.

ChatGPT has helped me write some scripts for things that otherwise probably would have taken me at least 30+ minutes and it wrote them in <10 seconds and they worked flawlessly. I've also had times where I worked with it to develop something that ended up taking me 45 minutes to only ever get error-ridden code that I had to fix the obvious errors and rewrite parts of it to get it working. Sometimes during this process it actually has taught me a new approach to doing something. If I had started from scratch coding it by myself it probably would have taken me only 10~ minutes. But if I was better at prompting what if that 45 minutes was <10 minutes? It would go from from a time loss to a time save and be worth using. So improving my ability to prompt is worthwhile as long as doing so trends towards me spending less time prompting.

Which is thankfully pretty easy to track and test. On average, as I get better at prompting, do I need to spend more or less time prompting to get the results I am looking for? The answer to that is largely that I spend less time and get better results. The models constantly changing and improving over time can make this messy - is it the model getting better or is it my prompting? But I don't think models change significantly enough to rule out that I spend less time prompting than I have in the past.