Completely agree with you - LLMs with access to search tools that know how to use them (o3, GPT-5, Claude 4 are particularly good at this) mostly paper over the problems caused by a lossy set of knowledge in the model weights themselves.

But... end users need to understand this in order to use it effectively. They need to know if the LLM system they are talking to has access to a credible search engine and is good at distinguishing reliable sources from junk.

That's advanced knowledge at the moment!