I had to take the same course, sans the cheating, just as a pre-requisite to Auto CAD and whatever it's called now. I'm not sure how drawing by hand helped me, but it is what it is.
Now, almost 30 years after my days of technical drawing, I must say that I consider those hours spent drawing a terrible waste of time, partly because I did not go on to the career for which technical school was preparing me, and secondly because technology has made pen and paper obsolete and I see no particular ability to carry over from hand and square technical drawing to CAD-assisted design.
The latter is an important point to consider now that we are moving from a non-AI world (like 10 years before my time in technical school) to a little-AI world (my first 3 or 4 years of technical school) to an anywhere-AI world.
They also absolutely shouldn't have learned to play musical notes since computers can do that.
My point is that learning the very basics of every human endeavor make you better prepared for any situation and will give you a better and deeper understanding.
In a CAD world, there is no reason to use pen and paper and a drafting machine. If I were to start learning technical drawing, how much time would I spend with the drafting machine? The answer is zero hours: there is no "market" for it (is there anyone who asks "please deliver without using CAD"?), it is not preparatory (as I wrote in another comment, is there anyone who is starting to learn how to play tennis using wooden rackets?), and it takes much longer to do anything with the drafting machine than using CAD.
Learning addition and multiplication is preparatory and useful. Being a Luddite is rarely useful.
Nowadays, when I teach very young people what AutoCAD is, I make them use a mini rolling ruler and tell them to watch youtube videos of how to use a rolling ruler. My understanding of CAD is high enough to know that every tool in CAD was inspired by and modeled after the rolling ruler. Sufficient to say, they understand and enjoy CAD very much after that point.
A similar line of thinking was popular in jiu jitsu, where veterans said that being competent with the gi was necessary to be competent in no-gi. Yet current no-gi winners basically never train with the gi.
In Fact, Modern programs in CAD do not follow the tools and principles that AutoCAD emphasizes. And those programs have charted a different course where the history and legacy of technical drawings has less relevance. (Case in point: Visio and maybe Powerpoint.)
For example, with regard to technical drawing, we might say that using the pencil, the square, and the drafting machine gives an understanding of drawing that the use of the computer cannot. But, for some reason, we don't say that using your finger and sand, or a rock and string to draw a circle helps even more. And we don't say that simply because the people who used rock and string (the good old days) are long dead.
The same goes for clothing, for which we say the 1990s, or perhaps the late 1960s, were better, but no one says that between 1900 and 1910 people dressed with such great taste.
The same goes for romantic partners ("if he hadn't dumped you and made you cry for a year and a half, you wouldn't have found your wonderful wife/husband"), and many other things.
It is very human to rationalize the circumstantial.
I like how people dressed in 1900s.
Let's take men's suits. They were made of heavy wool (today heavy wool is demodé, and rightly so because it is very uncomfortable), with three or four buttons (today 3-buttons are rarely seen, and rightly so, except for the 3-roll-2, which is not a "real" 3-button, 4-buttons are nowhere to be seen), the buttons were very high (the Neapolitan suit has high buttons, but much lower than the buttons on the suits of the early 1900s), and the shirts had high paper collars, which are nowhere to be seen. And the hats?
There is nothing current that recalls the clothing of those times.
The clothing in "Peaky Blinders," which is a decade older, is something like a fedora nowadays, please.