This is probably true. Having lived without the ability to search any random problem and have a snippet of code there, I'm used to searching for academic papers

This is probably true. Having lived without the ability to search any random problem and have a snippet of code there, I'm used to searching for academic papers, RFCs, or reference documentation and then build up my understanding and make an implementation that way. There are times that I've not done this though, for example a couple of years ago I was struggling to comprehend how to convert some math from a paper into actual code (the symbols were more than a little odd and I swear a bit of the equation was missing) and yet searching Github revealed a repo where someone had produced snippets of different obscure algorithms. Not quite a cut and paste, but definitely a "read the answer".