My friend who was in art-adjacent school did had to do huge amount of technical exercises. It is just not true that artists nowadays don't learn fundamentals. They do, plenty of them both directly relevant to what they will do and not relevant. Pretty much all art schools spend a lot of time on it.
Not the same ones as you would pick perhaps.
My friends who did mechanical engineering had to take classes on tool making.
Meanwhile nowadays you have metal sculpturers who cannot weld.