Yup.

But there's understanding and there's understanding. If all you have is a piece of paper then there's no way around analytical approach. People used to be unbelievably good at it, including the applied crowd, like engineers.

Having matlab at hand makes it possible to save years of analytical tinkering and simplifications and approximations.

It is useful to understand what happens exactly but we no longer need 3-4 years of calculus depths... I mean, this used to be THE subject in most engineering programs round the world. These days it's more like bootstrapping the intuition.