Yes, I remember those days all too well. "You need to learn to perform long division by hand because you won't always have a calculator with you."
LOL, no.
It will play out pretty much the same way this time.
Learning to do long division by hand trains the mind. It prepares you to understand polynomial division. It teaches you the deep connection of division and subtraction. So, mastering it should be part of the curriculum. As soon as it is truly mastered, it should be allowed to use a calculator.
I don't think I've ever had to do polynomial division by hand. It comes up in control theory and a few other subfields, obviously including mathematics itself, but for me it's always been handled by software. It's safe to say that any given clanker will have better odds of doing it right than I will.
But I think that this is foolish. Firstly, the fears weren't baseless! There's no question that the replacement of an oral culture by a literate culture meant the loss of certain cognitive skills for some people.
But more importantly, even if those fears were baseless, a fear in the past being baseless does not mean a similar one in the present is baseless. From our vantage point we can see the benefits of a literate society, but are we confident that what comes next will be as beneficial? Maybe it will be far more beneficial than literacy was, or maybe it will heighten inequalities to feudal levels. Either way, it's moving at a much more rapid pace than the spread of literacy, so we have much less time to reflect. It pays to be prudent here.
The number of people that cannot calculate a tip in their head, or have a basic grasp of how interest works is constantly shocking to me. Yeah, we all carry calculators around, but you should be able to reason about numbers enough to know when an entry error has been made on a calculator