I honestly think that, given the sorry state of the pre-GenAI internet, with all the SEO optimization nonsense, clickbait, and supplement peddling everywhere, LLMs are for now actually better than Google for “doing your own research” on many things.

At least at the entry level. Once you want to go in depth, the outcome in my experience is the same as with LLM use on any topic depends heavily on the domain knowledge of the prompter and their ability to steer it.