As someone with a PhD in CS focused on NLP (I started my PhD in 2018 just as Transformers were introduced), and with a strong background in distributed systems owing to the fact that I was a lead developer of an MMO before starting my PhD, I can definitively say that any surface-level understanding you get by interacting with an LLM, is just that: surface level.

If that allows you to target your deep dives better, then great. If instead your deep dive into a topic is purely through prompting an LLM, that will almost certainly end with little functional domain expertise.

The absolute best experience you can get is by trying, failing, then improving upon your past failures. Remove that friction at your peril.