This is a really underappreciated perspective. Few things are more disheartening than wanting to share understanding of a neat CS concept and have it fall on deaf ears.
Given enough experience and depth of knowledge, there comes a time where the gulf becomes insurmountable.
The theory is important. You can often tell the difference between someone that's been through it and someone that hasn't.
It's not just a copy and paste job without implications.
To the outside it is often a case of: "But this works too!"
Of course this could be mostly correlation, perhaps the type of people that seek degrees also enjoy learning more broadly in general.
What are the jobs where this kind of thing comes up? I've never had to do anything with multithreading or C++, and I'd estimate that the jobs where that stuff comes up is a tiny minority. I think it'd be cool to encounter these kinds of problems, but it just seems more like a niche thing to me these days.