My university had Dijkstra's quote "Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes". They made us aware of tools and we were free to use them as little or as much as possible to do the science. I always assumed that software engineering degrees focused on tools more than computer science degrees (among other differences).
Dijkstra was full of it. He wanted CS to be just a branch of abstract mathematics but that's never been the case. That's a retconning of history by people with math envy. Before Alan Turing had ever heard of the Entscheidungsproblem, he had already built simple mechanical computers with his bare hands.
It's cousin to a stupid mindset you see in software engineering, that you can somehow be a good engineer while not knowing what your hardware is actually doing. That's how you get complicated architecture-astronaut systems with good theoretical big-O characteristics, that get crushed by a simple for loop written by the guy who ran a profiler and knows what a cache line is. We live in a world made of atoms, not lemmas.
Research fields go rotten when they don't come into contact with reality enough: quantum computing, string theory, etc.
And as for astronomy: knowing how telescopes are constructed, how they work, their optical characteristics, limitations, failure modes, all of that is essential to observational astronomy. And if you study astronomy, you sure as fuck are taught how to use a telescope!!!
Astronomy as we know it didn't exist until we had good telescopes. Cosmological theories have risen and fallen on the advances in optical theory and engineering. Astronomy is very much about telescopes.
What other field is so ashamed of its own tools? Like, art isn't about pencils, but art students are taught how to hold a pencil! Stop repeating this thought-terminating cliche.