For the first year or so of learning Ruby and Rails, I did end up copying and pasting alot from SO. In fact, I think I had a streak of visiting SO every day for at least a year, and that wasn't idle browsing, that was "Oh shit I'm stuck, better hit up SO".
So now when I hear claims like this, I just assume it's coming from someone that is new enough to a specific technology that relying on SO is necessary for them.
I rarely visited SO for answers and I went through the novice phase like everyone else but I didn't pick the path of least resistance every time I'm faced with a technical problem, because I have a held belief that you can't accumulate knowledge and expertise if you don't polish your debugging/troubleshooting skills and make yourself go through the painful process of solving technical problems on your own without the help of someone else and I could say that help very much in honing my skills.
This thread is killing me. I have worked on a whole bunch of shit that has little to no documentation (SO included) in my career. I have had to figure out a lot of stuff on my own.
SO is amazing when it has information that I'm looking for. You know why? I don't want to have to figure out literally everything. I want to save my figuring energy for tasks worth applying it to.
So just get the fuckin' job done and do it right and quit pretending you're trying to achieve nirvana.
If you write a paper you also first cite what is state of the art. Before you go into details what Innovation you came up with. So researching SO first, before reinventing the Wheel. Resembles more the scientific way of problem solving. You can also learn a lot by reading and understanding all the different solutions that are often given to a Problem. Your time is better used if you solve new problems or find a better solutions than reinventing the wheel and you also learn as much if not more.
It's hard to argue much about this because nobody so far said what kind of problem we're trying to solve.
But I feel the first step should be going to the documentation of whatever language or library you're using, rather than Stack Overflow. SO will tell you the answer to a single question, the docs usually give some more information (you don't get "use this option", but "here are the options and this is what they do") so the chance is higher that next time, you'll just know the answer.
Of course when inexplicable things happen or when docs are bad, SO can be pure gold.
You of course don't want to go to SO for the "skill" of programming, you probably already know to do that as that is your craft. You go to SO for domain knowledge that you don't want to spend time scouring documentation for.
SO is a unique combination of framework docs and practical examples. Inevitably you'll find sample usages of the framework or domain knowledge, applied to a problem similar to the one you have and can apply easily using the "skill" or craft of programming.
Other than that, it's pretty much CRUD and algorithms that a developer has to do. And the latter of those is sadly not needed for most development work out there.
So now when I hear claims like this, I just assume it's coming from someone that is new enough to a specific technology that relying on SO is necessary for them.