“But that would be like telling a student in the 70s to pretend that calculators or computers don’t exist.”

If students of the 70s or today pretended they didn’t exist up to a certain point when they needed them to move forward, like bioinformatics or something, they 100% would be better off. There is plenty of research on off loading thinning providing a worse understanding of the material - eg side rules proving a better understanding than calculators.

If the challenge is held constant, giving people tools is just teaching a different skill set than teaching them unaugmented. The augmented skill set is more relevant to how people do work in the real world, but working through things unaugmented likely help people build a robust internal schema more quickly. We definitely don't need to spend as much time training unaugmented abilities going forward though, kind of like how the number of assembly related classes in CS departments has gone down over time as we've moved up the stack.

Exactly. I always think about the ways consumers make terrible decisions with everyday purchases at the grocery store etc. If people could easily estimate unit costs in their head for example, a lot of predatory options would have to go away. But calculators keep people from having to get good with everyday math in their head, while those same calculators sit unused in many everyday scenarios where people don't go to the effort to use them.

“You can use the electronic tuner once you learn to tune by ear” - any decent guitar teacher

I don't know if this was universal, but when I was a student we weren't allowed calculators until I believe 10th grade

You learn stuff by heart, so that when you mess up with the calculator you have a feel that stuff has gone wrong