Your post reminds me of when I started using a calculator in high school. I suddenly forgot how to do some math in my head. I had to discipline myself to not use that device for simple things, only ones that would take me several steps of complex math.
Then in college, we began to be allowed to bring certain calculators with us. That’s when the dependency on them ramped up.
We have these devices at our disposal, and now we can’t think on our own. The kids are taught to google it, instead of trying to figure things out on their own. No one knows how to think critically any more. I know I need to work at it myself.
I was a precision junky years ago. Every math problem had to be solved with ridiculous precision. Then, I met a mathematician at Stanford that changed my world. He showed in every large scale problem how precision wasn’t needed as it didn’t change the outcome. Massive algorithms could easily be simplified. So, I became a simplification nut. Today, I design high performance systems using simplification.