For software engineers, algorithmic complexity is a good filter for, say, Javascript hackers vs people with a university education in computer science. Just saying.
In my experience, building performant web applications is much more about things like reducing bundle size, making sure animations are hardware-accelerated, being smart about _when_ you do complex work... The cost of using an O(n^2) algorithm over an O(n) algorithm will rarely have a tangible impact, since you don't typically deal with item sets that large on the client.
Not debating that CS fundamentals are valuable, just that they are _far_ from the most important skillset to have. Give me a JS hacker who understands page load times over a CS grad who writes his own bucket sort algorithm any day.
I say this as a self taught programmer who studied a non-CS engineering well after learning about big-O.
The DBs implement the binary-search, not the back-end Dev.
For the average programmer, IMHO learning about data structures/algorithms makes you a better programmer, but it's not that essential.
When your UI is based on 25 megabytes of lists and maps, you do a lot of iterating and filtering. In our current implementation, it's possible, but difficult, to produce a case where it spends as much as a quarter of a second doing that in one go. But only the first time; if it takes that long (anything over 100ms), we memoize the call so the next time you get it for free. Binary search hasn't yet been required, but it's on our short list of performance improvements to apply once the backing data grows enough to require them.
Another project from last year was a tool to consume very large (250-300M) XML dumps from a very large, very expensive line-of-business system used by our finance department, and produce a wide variety of aggregations to simplify verifying the output of said very large, very expensive system, which I gather may not always be able to perform arithmetic correctly.
This one wasn't a team effort; it was one of those things where you get the spec on Friday afternoon and the deadline is Monday morning. (Not something I'd tolerate on a regular basis, but when the stakes are "it's this, or the SVP Finance sends a helicopter to retrieve the VP IT from a cruise liner"...) But it's also a frontend-only application, because installers take time to get right, too, and in any case something so simple has no need for a backend.
It takes about three minutes to fully parse, process, and report on a 250M XML dump. It leaks no resources, does not hang the UI thread, and presents a cute Bootstrap progress bar along with a table of running totals, so the user knows what it's doing. (Not gonna lie, I was showing off a little with the table. It's fun to watch numbers blur as they spin upwards in value!)
I concede that this tool doesn't do much work with long lists - mainly just the values of interest from the raw dump, which are several lists of maximum cardinality on the order of ten thousand, and the negligibly short lists used to maintain parser state information. But I do gather a certain impression that you're one of those sadly behind the times folks who still thinks of the browser/JS platform as a cute toy and a decent document reader, but not up to anything remotely resembling Real Computational Work, and I thought I'd include this example, as well as the other, in order to help disabuse you of that rather outdated notion.
And the front end is used for some pretty crazy things these days, eg 3D rendering. Sure if you're making a social network for cats it probably isn't an issue, but then not everyone is.
Apologies if I took it the wrong way!
But yeah, that's admittedly a tenuous thread.
The idea of "Software Engineering" was born with the Software Crisis report in the 1960's.
Later on practicing SE's would study things like Design Patterns so things evolved over time.
EDIT: Software Engineers probably should know some relevant basics, but programmers could never come up with a "body of knowledge" like real engineers have.
It all depends what you work on and what new developments keep coming out...