Knowledge of your Tools is Required
A common thread in my experience working in the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction industry is a handful of people who have a distinct lack of talent when it comes to necessary tool usage. Academically, there are still professors and lecturers who believe that caring about proficiency in field-specific tools misses the point. Spending time teaching students how to use the tools they will rely on in their career is seen as less important than building some generic foundation of skills.
While I empathize generally with this point, there is a stage at which failure to be proficient in your tools is a failure as a member of your field. I don't expect everyone to know every possible tool, and in many cases it is difficult to fit time to learn new tools into an already busy schedule. But the number of times I have run into tenured members of the industry who fail at things they should know how to do is discouraging. An inability to Google simple problems or follow simple instructions is a failure that overshadows almost any possible level of foundational or theoretical skill. Skill proficiency and "foundational skills" are mostly unrelated, but both are required to be effective in your job.
I'm sure this is not specific to the AEC industry. The number of memes and jokes I have seen about "my boss can't open a PDF" basically aligns with this idea. There is a broader understanding that one can be proficient at tool usage and not at theoretical skills. Low-level code monkeys and (formerly) draftsmen are often selected for this specifically, although I think in some cases there is an unfilled need for this sort of labor. The great shame here is that a draftsman or coder is more likely to absorb foundational skills via intellectual exposure and repetition, whereas proficiency in tools requires a certain type of experience that often does not happen with respected industry members.
I often heard in school that abstract design existed mostly in this latent space. The use of tools is simply the way to translate design into more useful artifacts. This is technically correct, but it is not a particularly useful way to think about things in a normal distribution of future laborers. Music also exists in an abstract space, and instruments are just one of many ways to translate that into useful artifacts. There are composers and producers who probably don't have much technical skill in any instrument. But trying to convince everyone to be their field’s equivalent of composers is irresponsible. It is mathematically impossible that everybody becomes a composer who never needs to touch a piano.
Tool proficiency is a collective requirement for an efficient firm. For each coworker who can't open a PDF or successfully sync to central, a bottleneck is created that requires more process, more hires, more opaque structures, and more catastrophic failures. Each senior employee who can't do simple things is a tax on the next generation, who get assigned simple dead-end tasks because they have a minimum level of tool proficiency. Even if they would go on to be more productive employees than those seniors, their progress is kneecapped by these inefficiencies. This is the guild protectionism of the incompetent senior employee.
One complaint I often hear is that specific software and tools come and go, so focusing on proficiency in any given one is irresponsible. This is like saying you will get a new car in a few years, so you shouldn't care about knowing how to drive the one you currently have. This is ludicrous. You will get a new car, and you will probably have to drive a friend’s car. There are some generic rules of the road that are important to know and translate well. But you should know how 45 mph feels under your feet in the car you currently have. You should know intuitively how well your car corners, how fast it accelerates, how responsive your brakes are, where your hazards and e-brake are located. If you refuse to know, understand, or feel these things, you will never be a proficient driver despite your theoretical foundation of driving and road rules. Everything is like this.
Once again, theoretical foundations and tool proficiency are orthogonal, and both are necessary for the average person. A campfire gives both heat and light. Theory without tools is a cool light. Tools without theory is a dim heat. Surviving the wilderness of your field requires both.