There seems to be a tendency to exaggerate the breadth of things that people should study. When you ask for specific instances where something would be useful, you usually get a hand wavy answer that since X field is connected to what you want to study, it is therefore worthwhile to study X field ("Of course computer scientists should study advanced chemistry, we wouldn't even have computers without chemistry! And what if you needed to written a program for chemists!").

In my experience people retain very little of something if they don't keep using it. Many people take things like calculus in highschool or college, and completely forget it within a few years. I often checked with classmates about how much they retained from courses we had just taken the previous semester, and most of the stuff that wasn't directly connected to what they were currently studying seemed to be forgotten (if they ever had a real understanding of it to begin with).

Who is going to write FEA software? Or rigid body dynamics simulation? Or the physically based rendering software? It's not going to be a typical electrical engineer.

Isn't modern ML based on differential equations?