It would be cool to be an expert at algorithms, apply them to hard problems, and build cool things. I feel like, for me, there's no point in learning them since the work I get is always "put a button here, update the DB" type stuff.
I have been able to do some algorithmic work in my 4 decades (mostly lately for generative art) but most of my career was How So I Ship This Complicated App With Too Few People In So Little Time. This usually requires creative thinking and experience, but rarely requires advanced knowledge of many of the topics mentioned. I never had a CS education so I had to learn things myself, but it still makes sense to me today to understand complex topics; even if you never use them, being able to understand such things is a benefit to the complex things you will have to do.
try a side project? when I think of fun ideas, I always notice how easy it is to bump into computationally hard or complicated stats/ML/math problems left and right, even if it's just a simple game.
I remember one time when I realized this: a TV show character suggested building an app that lets you take a picture of someone's shoes and then give you links where you could buy them. It sounded a) like a pretty good business idea and b) crazy hard to build (the time the show aired was before the Deep Learning proliferation iirc).
I suppose even then you'd use a library which solves the problem rather than figure out and build the entire thing yourself.
I do agree that algorithms are fun and the basic ones are probably useful in everyday work, but for anything complicated you'd rather use a proper library. It's also definitely good to have knowledge of their internal workings though.
I think this is the reality for the majority of software developers, although it's not to be underestimated because it's not just a one-off button, it ends up being dozens, hundreds of "simple" things like that. Keeping all of them up to date and consistent is where the challenge is in that regard, and not many people manage - in my experience, a lot of systems as you describe them are rewritten every 5-10 years.
