Exposure to the CS curriculum at least gives you a leg up in asking questions and working out the shape of your lack-of-knowledge.

Like, knowing that automata and complexity theory exists and remembering roughly how it works means that if something that needs that comes up, at least you have a sense of what you forgot about it.

For instance, having taken a database class where we worked in the relational algebra has helped me fluently write okay SQL even if I couldn't write out a sentence in the relational algebra to save my life.

I’ve never taken a relational algebra class in my life and neither have most dba’s. They learned sql by learning sql.

That's of course a perfectly good way to learn SQL and probably much cheaper. I'm not saying that you need relational algebra to write a query, that would be silly. I just mean that learning that stuff does stick with you.