“Give people tools to do shit” does not preclude “learning all the details”. And it’s not the last class people take!
The early lessons of SICP are more like teaching what's 2+2 in my opinion (substition model of function application, for example).
In terms of practicality of the content, honestly I'd say SICP was at least as bad as most intro lectures I've seen, and honestly should stay but be combined with something like companion labs with "battery included" builds to play with things.
It's hard to imagine the EECS program does not still require this material to earn a BS in CS or EE, but requiring four prerequisite courses probably interfered with non-EECS students who wanted to take junior/senior level EECS courses but did not want to have to run the "gauntlet of four" before doing so.
Now there is a generation of software engineers worried about losing their jobs to ChatGPT because they resigned to the fact that ChatGPT can probably glue things together better than they can long before they do the necessary work to understand ChatGPT from first principles. But this is branded as elitism, highly anti-bureaucratic.
Ask somebody at DeepMind exactly how AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol. At the end of the conversation, you will get a blank look. Don't even bother asking what inspired SD or DALL-E to generate a particular image.
What I lament here is not the fate of 6001 specifically. It probably was outdated and in need of a refresh of some sort. What I lament here is the rationale that Sussman gives and apparently buys into, that the new approach is acceptable, and it's acceptable because treating things as magic black boxes is an inherent feature of modern engineering. No one understands, no one can even be expected to understand, and that's Just The Way It Is, and it's OK.
Well, no, it's not OK. People can and must be expected to understand because the magic black boxes aren't actually magic. They were created by mere mortals not that long ago, some of whom went to MIT and read SICP. If SICP is dated (and it is) the thing to do is to update and improve it, not to discard it.