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Anecdotal side story: I grew up in Asia (30 years ago) and went through primary school there before moving to the US. The country I was raised in had and has some of the highest international math scores in the world. But I always wondered why that mattered at all.
Every weeknight after school, I was forced to attend something called "Kumon", which is a Japanese torture method that puts kids in dank basements for multiple hours a day, doing hundreds of rote math problems in harsh florescent light. https://www.kumon.com/how-kumon-works
I did that for several years in lieu of having any after school social life or what the West would consider a "childhood". Eventually I just couldn't take it anymore and started getting all wrong answers on purpose, then tearing out random pages, then throwing entire booklets out the window, much to my proctors' and parents' chagrin. Eventually I just refused to do any more, period, and would rip up every booklet and break every pencil they gave me.
All that really taught me was to absolutely hate math and question authority. It contributed to significant depression and I dropped out of high school as a suicidal teenager.
Eventually I moved to America and got a GED (high school equivalency diploma). I finished the test in a third of the time and scored the highest math scores that exam center had ever seen (they told me), ending in the national 99th percentile. I shrugged. What the US considered high school equivalent I had learned in elementary and middle school. I wasn't proud of it, far from it... it all seemed like a pointless dog and pony show.
I never really used math again after that, even after 20 years of programming. Maybe some arithmetic here and there for bills and to split a Venmo dinner. That's about it.
Why was there such a high focus on such a pointless yet painful skill? I know one statistician in my life, but nobody else I know uses anything past basic algebra in adult life. Most never even use arithmetic.
Meanwhile, traditionally underappreciated humanities like English reading and writing have profoundly shaped who I am as a person, in terms of developing perspective, ethics, and empathy. Being able to write fluently in English -- better than some native speakers -- has led to more job and career and romantic opportunities than math ever did.
Maybe it's not a bad thing we're falling behind in math. The US still has one of the biggest economies (the wealth gap is different), and maybe that is in part because of our cultural focus on individual differentiation and a diverse curriculum, not a tunnel vision focus on rote STEM problems?
Maybe kids shouldn't waste time on esoteric math that they'll likely never use in adult life anyway. It's like cursive, some aristocratic holdover from a time before everyone had smartphones, Google Sheets, etc.
Just my two trauma-informed cents.