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I do wish more students had an attitude of "learning this is cool" as opposed to "how will I use this"
I like Star Trek's vision of humanity: in the future, when material needs are met, we explore the universe for discovery's own sake.
I didn't read it as a case of getting rid of degrees so much as adjusting the most commonly taught path of math for US schools.
Curiosity gets you very far, especially in the era of AI, but we still seem to have standard ideas about what people should learn (eg the US inexplicably is awful at teaching finance and accounting to highschoolers). I was homeschooled, and so not subjected to very much of the "standards" and yet the bled into my own education because my parents, not being intellectuals or particularly curious people, just kind of looked at what everyone else was learning and said, let's do that.
I suppose if we are thinking about school as a project that is supposed to help young people have the skills that make them useful in the world (and possibly to inspire them by giving a little taste of how big and interesting the world is), we might consider abandoning many subjects in favor of more practical ones.
Homeschooling my own kids, I can basically do anything (especially in Texas), it's interesting that I tend to follow the paths where curricula have already been developed. And it certainly takes more effort and thought to go off the beaten path.
I was trained as an engineer. Technically, I don't use 95% of the things I learnt during my courses. Yet, the problem-solving skills I learned along the way are probably helping me a lot in my current work.
So, no, I don't regret taking courses on general relativity or fluid mechanics. They were indirectly useful. And they've helped me understand the world at a deeper level, and that's worth a lot.
The specific course matters less than the broader skills you learn.
So, for that reason, I'm not going to argue in favor of or against trigonometry, cryptography, etc., with our favorite ETH armchair philosopher...
Also, with purely utilitarian thinking, we can probably get rid of a lot of degrees.
But would that be a sad world...