Back in the day, the downvotes here would flow like a river at the suggestion that an engineering career behooved one to understand Calculus and Linear Algebra with Statistics and Differential Equations if possible thrown in for good measure because Peter Thiel said college degrees were worthless and he was even offering $100K to some lucky winners to prove his point. Admittedly, I would have probably taken that offer had I been 18 and then gone to college afterwards, but it seemed to deliver mixed results.
For the above math comes up again and again writing software. Pure math like real analysis, graduate level algebra, number theory and topology not so much. I'm guessing the rise of AI demonstrated the previous mindset against math was poppycock all along so now we've gone to the opposite extreme and made it a religion? I think people are bringing their own biases into that interpretation and you are right about which biases.
But, also, not my problem. My personal bias is that I recognize this problem as exactly the sort of thing that gets brought up as a gotcha interview question by people who couldn't come up with that exact solution themselves yet understand it just enough to use it to make an interviewee squirm.