The crucial difference is that at no point I felt I was stuck. I could paste any line of code into ChatGPT and ask it to explain it. Practically every time I got a meaningful and valuable explanation, moreover the explanation was in the context of my code. Similarly all functions it generated were matching the context of my code so I could just copy and paste it and it just worked, most of the time.

Rather than going through Google and Stackoverflow it felt like working side-by-side with a moderately competent developer. Mind you, I have tried the google-and-stackoverflow method before for the exact same thing, and failed every time ;-)