I think the reason people talk past each other on this is that some of them are using LLMs for every little question they have, and others are using them only for questions that they can't trivially answer some other way. Sure, if all your questions have straightforward, uncontroversial answers then the LLMs will often find them on the first try, but on the other hand you'd also find them on the first try on wikipedia, or the man page, or a google search. You'll only think the ChatGPT is useful if you've forgotten how to use the web.

If you're only asking genuinely difficult questions, then you need to check every single time. And it's worse, because for genuinely difficult questions, it's often just as hard to check whether it's giving garbage as it would have been to learn enough to answer the question in the first place.