I mean ... once you put it that way, yes, I'm actually willing to bite that bullet! (Or at least a cleaned-up, steelmanned version of it.)
It's vanishingly unlikely that any student who learns "personal finance", with no practical application, is going to retain it for the 5+ years until they'll actually need to use it. Learning doesn't work that way -- with, as you note, a few exceptions for unusually motivated students ... who would probably be able to learn it on their own when the time comes.
Ditto for the famous meme about "why don't schools teach something useful, like doing my taxes?" Because it would come across as an ungrounded, garbled mess that you'd forget by the time it was actually relevant.
So yes, I'd say that generally, education should work by grounding lessons in some kind of practical application. And indeed, like the other comments note, that's how it works for some of your other examples, like actually cooking something for home ec, or doing CPR on a dummy (which mimics most of the dynamics of the real thing, even if imperfectly).
I think there's a real human need being expressed by the common complaint, "When are we ever gonna use this stuff?" I'd phrase it as, "You're not grounding this material in a way that allows me to reason about it, and what's important vs isn't."
So, to the extent that we want to prepare students for "the real world" -- in particular, things like "doing your taxes" and "evaluating a car loan" -- I'd say the best way to address it would be by teaching the (meta-)skill of "learning an unknown domain". (Yes, "learning how to learn" ... but as an explicit skill, not one applied to material that is itself too artificial.) That's something you could apply to practical problems, even if they're not the same ones students will be solving later.
Applying this insight to the teaching of literary analysis: frame it as refuting an internet comment that doesn't understand that a song is a metaphor.
In fact, one thing that frustrates me about how the teach estimation in math is that they teach a useless version of it: you do something that takes about as long as calculating the exact value, except you add some rounding steps because you're told you can't give an exact answer. What you should instead do is give a timed test, which much more problems that usual, and only require approximate answers. Then you're forced to save time by rounding.
Late edit:
>Using the logic underpinning this article, the only things taught in school should be how to play video games, how to find the best parties and how to get laid; since those are the only things actually relevant to students at that stage of their life.
Yes, it does annoy me when the education system neglects the teaching of some skills that don't come naturally to some students, but not other skills.