The only reason I took calculus is because it was the next math course after pre-calc and I still had a year left in high school. I didn’t even realize that there was a type of math that could be used to exactly calculate quantities related to continuously changing processes, but I was absolutely fascinated by how many real world problems calculus could solve - I realized that the problems given in algebra were contrived out of necessity to resolve in a neat manner. Now I had access to an entirely new vocabulary that allowed me to describe the world as it is, not as it needed to be to neatly fit in a 10th grade word problem.
Until that point I was interested in psychology (and had a vague notion that I’d drop out of school to make a career in music somehow), but I immediately dropped everything to take as many math and physics courses as I could. 14 years later and I work in a very math heavy engineering oriented field.
I know my story is probably atypical, and I have no clue what I’d be doing right now if I hadn’t taken calculus, but it’s one of those things that I look at in hindsight and think that I was that close to giving up on STEM, but for being forced to take Calculus. Instead, I earned my Ph.D. in applied math, and there’s not a day where I don’t use calculus of some kind.