A better metaphor would perhaps be machining. You will not find a shop that has no CNC anywhere, but the machinists who can also use manual machines will always have an edge for certain things. Not that they're working manually much in their day to day, and not as all as a failsafe, but you can just tell who has that kind of background.

(And you can also tell whose mind is stuck in the old world, too.)

It's first-principles thinking. You have to have some sense of how you would do it in order to reasonably engage with a machine's idea of how to do it. Otherwise you're just nodding along, like yeah sure bro uhhhh lgtm.