Often finding an answer gives me useful knowledge I can then use in other circumstances, but I can't possibly know every corner of my OS.

Recently I found my only machine running FreeBSD (as a testing machine) was kernel crashing occasionally. On a whim I googled '<machine name> kernel crash', and found a page which discussed an extra linux boot-time flag I had to add, to disable some feature of the graphics card. I couldn't figure out how to do the same thing on FreeBSD, so just switched to Debian, and added the magic option. No more crashes. Now the machine runs a FreeBSD VM on top of linux.

Well, this specific case is trolling zealots, not tech support.

I mostly agree with you, but there are some unique facts that, back in the day, you just sort of had to know. something like

    echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward

You know exactly what you need to do, but haven't memorized the name of the bit to twiddle to get the behavior you want. Now there are, of course, tools to configure these sorts of things. More importantly, google and stackoverflow help immensely with this kind of thing.