That "a good model (if you know how to operate it well)" is doing a lot of lifting. To be sure, there are a lot of bad books, and you can get negative advice from them, but a book has fixed content that can gain and lose a reputation, whereas a model (even a good one!) has highly variable content dependent on "if you know how to operate it well". So when someone or some group that I respect recommends a book, I can read the words with some amount of trust that the content is valuable. When someone quotes a model's response without any commentary or affirmation, it does not inspire any trust that the content is valuable. It just indicates that the person has abdicated their thought process.