Of course you can find PhDs that don’t master fundamentals properly, but that remains rare. PhD quals are supposed to root that out. It’s also true that in day to day electronic engineering, any sufficiently complicated circuit would be solved with SPICE or an equivalent. For a PhD student in electronic engineering to not know that SPICE essentially solves ODEs still seems very surprising.

Actually I found that almost no one mastered fundamentals properly when I was an EE undergrad, at least with respect semiconductor physics (and an antenna theory). The "holes and electrons" stuff fundamentally violates conservation of charge because at first the "holes" are stationary but later, with the Hall Effect, suddenly they're moving, that's a bit of sleight of hand that no one cottoned on to. Not the profs, not the legions of grad students. It really does go to show how much of education is cargo cult learning. It turns out that in fact both the 'holes' and the 'electrons' of semiconductor theory are statistical virtual particles and not the fundamental particles that they are purported to be. (Somewhere in my past comments is the similar bit about antennas if anyone is interested)