My understanding was that to call yourself an engineer one must be capable of building robust and efficient things, whether that thing is a plane, or a bridge, complex software, even a website, matters not, so long as it is robust and efficient.
The degree to which you understand mathematics is useful only in how greatly it can enable you to build something robust and efficient. Thus, if you know more linear algebra than 90% of all mere mortals, but write inefficient programs, then at best you are a bad Software Engineer, at worst you're simply not a Software Engineer.
For that reason, at my current job I was asked to replace a man who earned his PhD in Computer Science from Georgia Tech who's job was to build an maintain an API in Go, despite the fact that I'm a college dropout. Smart man, with a far better understanding of mathematics, but ultimately I could build things more robustly and efficiently. I had stronger engineering skills.
Going back to OP, right on man. I personally didn't enjoy math until I learned it using my own rules, by own rules I mean I shunned the established method of repetition until you memorized the process, instead opting to understand the underlying concept and keep my thoughts written away somewhere for future reference, knowing all too well by now that memorization is futile given how frequently I have to reference Stack Overflow.