I feel really out of the loop here. I went through a pretty standard curriculum in the 2000s and have never owned or used a graphing calculator (aside from the few times the teacher demonstrated our school's TI-83s in class in high school). What are they used for?
[And while I used a bog standard scientific calculator regularly in science/stats classes, I'm pretty sure my calculus classes disallowed calculators and only stuck to magic numbers that were easy to manually calculate with. It might even be plausible to go through a whole math curriculum without a calculator apart from whatever stats/applied classes you're required to take.]
> I'm pretty sure my calculus classes disallowed calculators and only stuck to magic numbers that were easy to manually calculate with
That's the key. There's two schools of thought that have their pros and cons. 1) using magic number means no calculator, but students can get by searching for clean answers and might not truly understand the topic. 2) using real world examples grounds the curriculum in reality so there isn't a gap applying it, and you're not used to the cleanliness in the future, but might be a bit opaque in the short term.
Both sides have pretty good arguments why they do better than the other teaching a number sense to students about the various transformations.
I have a strong bias towards the first school, the point being that opaque calculation are simply harder to reason about.
I also agree that handling complex computations is a relevant skill, but then what you need to learn is the mental book keeping of where you are and what you need to do that you need to learn.
The only case where calculators are truly useful is in sciences, where numbers are just a tool to scientific insight.
(moreover in math if you need trigonometric tables chances are that you are going to learn better math by keeping symbolic answers)
[And while I used a bog standard scientific calculator regularly in science/stats classes, I'm pretty sure my calculus classes disallowed calculators and only stuck to magic numbers that were easy to manually calculate with. It might even be plausible to go through a whole math curriculum without a calculator apart from whatever stats/applied classes you're required to take.]