Graduate students need to think in terms of 4-6 years while forward looking professors might want to think in terms of 5-15 years.
However, I guess one drawback is that a lot of the things we currently implement are all written from scratch (for very standard things such as numerical differentiation and parameter optimisation), which has the advantage of having "control" and more understanfing over the code, but less time saving/potentially not as efficient as using pre-existing libraries.
In the process, they would have understood nearly every approach taken by the group towards producing the results that it does, and I bet that has helped them when they've ended up modifying that same code later for their research. And with fewer supervisor meetings to work out exactly what X, Y and Z part of the code does because they will have worked on it themselves.
I'd say I've easily spent 6 months just spending time getting my head around all the code we work with anyway, so at the very least, I hope that made their following years of research more productive.
A bad advisor wouldn't care what his students wanted, but a good advisor might still have students work on this kind of project as long as they were aware it wasn't going to help them get a tenure track position in the future. If they wanted to go work at a national lab doing HPC work and programing it might have been plenty ok for their career (This is what I am transitioning to now) or if they want to go work for a hedge fund or apple it might also be an okay option.