This feels like a "tech bro" idea from someone who has never touched a SEM field (STEM minus the T).
You can’t “brush up” on something you never learned
For the [current] layperson, each of those things I mentioned I might as well be speaking in Martian.
https://dibeos.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/what_happens_t...
You'll (probably) never apply the ability out the kinetic energy vs. time of a ball rolling down a hill, but these exercises build understanding of the tools. Derivatives are everywhere in a fundamental electric circuits course, you need to have an intuitive understanding of basic calculus. The relationship between current through and voltage across ideal inductors and capacitors are directly described in the language of calculus, even if you're not "using" the calculus substitutions you learned each time you analyse a circuit.
And good luck getting through a couple weeks of an introductory quantum mechanics course without using calculus as a fundamental building block. You can solve many of these problems with computers, but it's not going to build intuition on how to approach future problems. (I don't mean this as a joke or picking an arbitrary complicated-sounding topic; this is a core course in some engineering programs.)
Many engineering problems have nice closed-form equations (at least to get approximations). Obtaining those equations often involves calculus, and someone has to do that in the first place.
(I'm giving examples from the lens of my education, but each field of science, engineering, and mathematics will have their own context, and will vary from little-to-no calculus to being all-calculus.)