See these videos for examples:

Sine bar (This Old Tony): https://youtu.be/PO-Ab7YfBzY

Compound slide tricks (Blondiehacks): https://youtu.be/6AQzDVic-hk

Trig isn't so useful if you can measure everything, & I've made the mistake of using trig to skip measuring only to find that nothing's built straight. But it helps to ball park

Once was sitting on the edge of a river with my father & he raised the question of how wide the river was. A quick estimate was possible: stand straight across from a landmark point, then measure walking along the river for some distance. Measure the angle towards that previous landmark. Multiply traveled length by tan(angle). A particularly nice angle is 45 degrees, which requires very little math since tan(45) = 1 & 45 is an easy angle to eye ball

I suppose that's an indirect admission that you weren't an EE major.