Watched a buddy of mine ask a super basic question in a woodworking group last month and within an hour it turned into a whole thing about whether he was even a "real" carpenter. He ended up deleting the post and just googled it himself lol. Honestly smaller niche forums or even old reddit threads seem way calmer than those big facebook groups now.

My buddy Dan did the same thing last year with some weather app tutorial. He felt guilty about it for weeks, like he was faking it or something. Then he actually read through the code line by line and realized he had to change like half of it anyway because the API was outdated and nothing worked out of the box. By the time he was done fixing it he understood way more than if he had written it all from scratch. Copying is just a starting point, you still gotta make it yours.