It felt like I was basically decoding the problem, then turning to google for the answer, and it kind of felt like cheating. But that's also how I'd operate in the real world, so I guess it's not cheating?
I put it down and come back to it, too. Each time I start from the beginning, and more bits are just in memory, and looking up specific commands is more about remembering the options than trying to figure out how to do it. When I first started playing, google was my main source but I've started turning to the man pages first, because it ends up being less effort digesting that than reading through a bunch of fluff to get to my specific use case.
As an industry junior now, I get asked all the time on how to get started. Out of desire to not give a gatekeeping response, I can only shrug and point people to OTW-Bandit/picoCTF and tell them to try to do what they can on their own but Google every answer if they have to. Everybody's got to start somewhere [e: snip].
I'll freely offer kudos to anyone with zero knowledge who even manages to go through a handful of exercises while looking up every answer if they otherwise would have not done anything hands-on at all.
I should probably tweak my response a bit by adding a standing offer of approachability if they actually give it a shot and get stuck on those particular CTFs I suggest them.
Oh, and yes, I have encountered many a CTF problems with very poor problem descriptions. I often don't feel bad about searching around deeply in those cases, if it's not a live competition.