Hell im taking shortcuts now as a fully grown adult; just because it is so _so easy_, and I absolutely see my skills atrophy.

It’s terrible.

The wrong assumption is that you had any skills before that. But what you (and nearly all of us did) was using other sources to generate work. You looked up stuff online, asked a colleague who did this before and so on. Then simply fitted you heard into what you were doing. Now the source is one place and you are romanticizing former you.