While I do use search engines and the resultant resources all the time, I don't follow steps completely cluelessly/mindlessly and later forget that I did it. I don't know what the equivalent would be for non-tech - I at least try to understand what a guide is doing so I can reproduce it independently later. I try to develop basic intuition for everything that I do. It is hard for me to imagine someone who lacks that ability. I don't mean to be offensive to anyone in particular, I just use "idiots" for the sake of argument to explain how any setting will eventually be found and changed.
Is it normal to forget the steps you took to accomplish a task? To, say, specifically turn off a setting for crash protection, then completely pull a blank if the program gets into a crash loop later?