There's a lot you can do in programming without knowing a ton of math, just like these days you can drive a car quite well without having a degree in mechanical engineering. But just like with a car, the more you know about the deep underpinnings of things, the more you can do. A person with deep knowledge of how their car works may rebuild the engine and overbore the cylinders for more displacement, put in a camshaft with more lift, and replace the factory exhaust manifold with headers with better flow.

A computer programmer who understands the mathematical underpinnings of his work might replace the standard library implementation of HashMap with one that's better suited to his use case, or do his own derivations to figure out how to implement back-propagation in a neural network, etc.

No, it's not a perfect analogy, but the point stands I think - having the deep knowledge of the theory and foundations in any field enables you to push the boundaries beyond any "black box" that is provided to you.