I'm thrilled that my GP is willing to slog through research, or look up things she's not 100% sure of. Sure, I've got access to much of the same information. She's got the training to interpret it though. We were discussing vitamin supplements and fortification at our last visit. I wasn't entirely sure about a couple of the claims she made, so I dug up some articles and emailed them to her. A couple days later I got a response with an interpretation of the articles (essentially, nothing to worry about).
Or, how about this? I've got a rare variant of a fairly common condition (such that a GP probably wouldn't see this firsthand). I'd seen a specialist at a world renowned hospital before. Those visits were expensive and not very informative. Visit with the GP? Huh that's unusual, let's see what the options are. Her conclusion? You can go through a variety of expensive tests, but unless I'm symptomatic the best course of action is no action. Now, I was curious, so I looked all that up after the visit. Fuck if I know how to discern how expensive those tests are or whether or not I'd see any benefit. There's a ton of information out there, but the big bucks are spent on people who a.) know how to find it and b.) how to interpret it.
To bring it to a tech setting -- let's think about Jenkins. I've cobbled together a build pipeline for chef cookbooks for one of our apps across our prod and non-prod environments. Sure, we pull credentials from the Jenkins credential store. No, I can't tell you off the top of my head the exact syntax to pull a secret out of there. But I can tell you where I'd look for instructions. Being able to be productive with Groovy (yuck) is part of my job, but it's not the only part of my job. Being able to find the relevant information is far more important than having to memorize it.