The picture is much bigger than that.
There's a rapidly increasing percentage of the population who grew up with search engines who haven't a clue how to do actual research.
"Ask and it appears before you" is to knowledge what ordering from a menu is to cooking.
All manner of skills aren't learned, connections lost, processes never seen, and strategies made invisible. And synthetic reasoning is impossible without them.
This is something I don't understand. OK I graduated high school in 2005. Now when I was in middle school, we had a "computer class" where we learned Microsoft Word and making a basic HMTL website, but I believe that class was an elective that not everyone took.
Then in high school, we had a computer class that I think was compulsory, but the main focus was typing.
Later in high school, there was more computer education, but it wasn't a class, and it was compulsory and everyone had to do it. They had this charging cart full of IBM Thinkpads (the one with the red button cursor) that they pushed around to all the classes. This was training specifically and only about how to use a search engine and do research.
Did they not do this at all high schools? Because people my same age and within a few years of my graduation year seem to be clueless as to the fact that search engines even exist, let alone how to use them. Hell, I remember when Google and others had power searching where you could use the dash/minus (-) to exclude terms to refine your searches better (now long deprecated, much to my dismay).
Further compounding the issue with forums is that I assume most people find them by way of a search engine, especially niche forums like this. Do they even try to search for their question, or just jump straight to searching for boards onto which to foist their
horribly redundant and already answered 100 billion times a day questions? And did everyone just collectively forget how to use search engines? Like wtf.
Now I understand people currently graduating high school might not have had such training, having grown up with it, it's often presumed they know how to use it (the Internet). But they often don't because they still need to be taught, just because it existed before their birth doesn't mean they intrinsically know how to use it.