I’m glad that at the very least, we both agree that most of what comprises an engineering curriculum is not actually used by most real-world engineers on a daily basis. As a particular case in point, I doubt that anybody would dispute that other than perhaps at the highest levels of R&D, practically no real-world engineers actually derive solutions to the Navier-Stokes equations as part of their daily routines: which immediately raises the question of why engineering programs insist upon spending so much time teaching them.
Regarding your point that such knowledge serves as “the right basis to use what you actually will day to day without having to think too hard about it” - I would dispute this notion. In contrast, I would point to the not insignificant proportion of engineers who barely graduated with GPA’s at or close to the minimal 2.0 cutoff. Let’s be perfectly honest: those engineers who barely graduated didn’t really understand the material. They don’t have much of a foundation upon which any higher level knowledge of software might be based. Nevertheless, they still hold bonafide ABET-accredited engineering degrees. They’re still allowed to work as engineers - and indeed, many do. Heck, right off the top of my head, I can think of a few such people who have nevertheless successfully worked as engineers for several decades now. To this very day, they freely admit they don’t really understand the material taught in their coursework and never did.
It’s therefore hard not to draw the conclusion that - unless one is aiming for a career in research or academia - you don’t really need to know most of what is taught in a standard engineering curriculum in order to work as an engineer. Might it be nice to know? Perhaps. But you don’t actually need to know it.