I am a CPA by training originally, but have spent most of my time in operational finance roles for PE-backed technology companies. While my work is all finance and accounting related, I mostly work with SQL and Python day to day creating internal applications for things like ARR etc.

I agree completely on your "thorough grounding" comment. I spend a lot of time explaining to finance people how tools like python, SQL, AWS stuff can be leveraged in simple ways for analytical purposes, and I spend a lot of time explaining to technology people what all the finance and accounting stuff is really about. In both cases my experience is it always comes back to explaining fundamental ideas or concepts over and over, but applying them to different situations and contexts (I do so much more confidently when explaining accounting and finance stuff since I have deeper education & experience there).

A lot of times these fundamental ideas and concepts can be explained very simply and intuitively using toy examples. the problem is it can take years and years to build up enough experience to really separate the signal from the noise and see clearly what is truly fundamental (yes that's where formal education is helpful but it can be hard to really grok absent experience imo... In the same way learning a programming language can be easier if you just try to build something).

A deep understanding of fundamental concepts is what allows you to pick apart very complex and novel problems into it's component parts. A deep understanding of fundamental concepts is one of the things that separates professionals from non-professionals in my opinion.