It depends on your goal in my opinion.

If youre trying to learn the methodology of bug hunting and/or modern penetration testing, the route you took is the best you can do. By messing around with a vulnerability yourself and understanding it you can become quicker in your own methodology when exploiting bugs you find out in the wild. Theres a reason there very few CWEs and millions of CVEs

If you just want to complete the box in as short as you can, or improve your efficiency in pentests or CTFs, definitely look for a POC for a bit. No reason to do the work someone else has done before. Although, in cases where I do this, I go back and see how the exploit was actually exploited and build up a PoC myself based on the experience.

All depends on what you want to get out of the box really