I didn't get to be a senior engineer by immediately being able to solve novel problems. I can now solve novel problems because I spent untold hours solving trivial ones.
There is a vast difference between “never learned the skill,” and “forgot the skill from lack of use.” I learned how to do long division in school, decades ago. I sat down and tried it last year, and found myself struggling, because I hadn’t needed to do it in such a long time.
This sentence contains the entire point, and the easiest way to get there, as with many, many things, is to ask “why?”
No-ones becomes a good mathematician without first learning to write simple proofs, and then later on more complex proof. It's the very stuff of the field itself.
Edit: let's look at a paper like Some Linear Transformations on Symmetric Functions Arising From a Formula of Thiel and Williams https://ecajournal.haifa.ac.il/Volume2023/ECA2023_S2A24.pdf and try and guess how many of trivial things were completely unneeded to write a paper like this.
If you send a kid to an elementary school, and they come back not having learned anything, do you blame the concept of elementary schools, or do you blame that particular school - perhaps a particular teacher _within_ that school?
While we have a lot of abstractions that solve some subproblems, there still need to connect those solutions to solve the main problem. And there’s a point where this combination becomes its own technical challenge. And the skill that is needed is the same one as solving simpler problems with common algorithms.