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This is true. It's not necessarily the case that we should be "rewarded" for saying I don't know. But that saying should not reflect on the perception of one's overall competence. Tech work is often about learning on the fly to solve the problem at hand.
But we can start to understand how that mindset comes into conflict with other common assumptions about what it means to be an "expert". People often expect experts to demonstrate their expertise by being "right" about any question that gets asked.
We're expected to be "right" about systems that we didn't code, didn't design, have no documentation, and have been changed over time by many different people. It has never been a reasonable expectation. But we haven't found a different way to think about "expertise".
This also starts to scratch the surface of why we have such a hard time talking about the difference between who is a "Senior" dev and who is not. Both end up saying "I don't know" about the same amount. The differences aren't about encyclopedic knowledge.
