Thanks to the current SEO nightmare, I can no longer use search engines the same reliability as before. Stackoverflow is too toxic and often all I need is to properly look up some more obscure stuff about some API, which “could just be googled”. AI, of course, is very unreliable.
Searching code on Github, then adjusting it in many ways to my needs (like to a different language, renaming variables to make more sense, additional optimizations, etc.) seems way more feasible nowadays. However, while there’s a lot of code with very permitting licenses (including public domain licenses), others are not so much, and I don’t want to argue against them, often I’m even understanding the reasons behind their decisions. I even try to give credit wherever I can, or look up the original source of an algorithm I find being referenced by someone else.
Yes, you should, as you already do.
Is your question whether you should worry? Whether you should link the source when you’re illegally ignoring license terms? Or when you’re following license terms?