Everyone deserves an experience like that, at the very least – everyone deserves to be in a position where they have the opportunity to really enquire, or engineer, or know what it's like to solve new problems. It really is a good purpose that education could meet.

I'm frustrated that "good management" involves breaking things down so small that there is no room for enquiry or engineering. Jira ticket #5229 "Port get_order_* API" doesn't leave much room for problem solving.

It’s almost like business needs come first

Is there a world where we put people's needs first?

Really? There are tons of people who learn while working, which is what I assmue you are advocating for rather than literally "eliminat[ing] the distinction between education and production," which would include school children working. This is especially true in the top end of fields like medicine. Surgeons create and learn new surgeries, for example. And I don't think Sergey Brin took a course on how to create Google in university, and the Google engineers did not learn how to scale it there either. See also the massive research arms of Google et al. So "every single human being" is trivialy false.

But even in the general case, college does not directly prepare you for your proffesion (nor is it meant to) and you are expected to learn on the job. And if what you say is true that you are not learning while working there would be no reason for companies to seek employees with experience.