Do you disagree with my take or think I’m missing Witt’s point? I’d be happy to hear from people who disagree with me.
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I seriously doubt that was ever true, except perhaps for a very brief time in the 1950s or 60s.
Linear programming is an incredibly niche application of computing used so infrequently that I've never seen it utilised anywhere despite being a consultant that has visited hundreds of varied customers including big business.
It's like Wolfram Mathematica. I learned to use it in University, I became proficient at it, and I've used it about once a decade "in industry" because most jobs are targeted at the median worker. The median worker is practically speaking innumerate, unable to read a graph, understand a curve fit, or if they do, their knowledge won't extend to confidence intervals or non-linear fits such as log-log graphs.
Teachers that are exposed to the same curriculum year after year, seeing the same topic over and over assume that industry must be the same as their lived experience. I've lost count of the number of papers I've seen about Voronoi diagrams or Delaunay triangulations, neither of which I've ever seen applied anywhere outside of a tertiary education setting. I mean, seriously, who uses this stuff!?
In the networking course in my computer science degree I had to use matrix exponentiation to calculate the maximum throughput of an arbitrary network topology. If I were to even suggest something like this at any customer, even those spending millions on their core network infrastructure, I would be either laughed at openly, or their staff would gape at me in wide-eyed horror and back away slowly.