I disagree. Senior professionals might have a better understanding because they have spent a lot of time drawing, but the specific tool is not relevant.
It is like saying that playing tennis with a wooden racket gives you a better "feel" for the ball and therefore is preparatory to using modern rackets. No one does this because it is not true.
A similar line of thinking was popular in jiu jitsu, where veterans said that being competent with the gi was necessary to be competent in no-gi. Yet current no-gi winners basically never train with the gi.
That is definitely true, that knowing and understanding a tool is not important to actually succeeding with the tool. But it does help a confused person understand why tools are made the way they are.
In Fact, Modern programs in CAD do not follow the tools and principles that AutoCAD emphasizes. And those programs have charted a different course where the history and legacy of technical drawings has less relevance. (Case in point: Visio and maybe Powerpoint.)
I would say that there is an overemphasis, although understandable, on the usefulness of what happened or was used before the current state, position or technology.
For example, with regard to technical drawing, we might say that using the pencil, the square, and the drafting machine gives an understanding of drawing that the use of the computer cannot. But, for some reason, we don't say that using your finger and sand, or a rock and string to draw a circle helps even more. And we don't say that simply because the people who used rock and string (the good old days) are long dead.
The same goes for clothing, for which we say the 1990s, or perhaps the late 1960s, were better, but no one says that between 1900 and 1910 people dressed with such great taste.
The same goes for romantic partners ("if he hadn't dumped you and made you cry for a year and a half, you wouldn't have found your wonderful wife/husband"), and many other things.
It is very human to rationalize the circumstantial.
I am a bit puzzled by these comments. "It is an inspiration for many media," sure, for historical television programs, certainly not for the everyday clothing of our times.
Let's take men's suits.
They were made of heavy wool (today heavy wool is demodé, and rightly so because it is very uncomfortable), with three or four buttons (today 3-buttons are rarely seen, and rightly so, except for the 3-roll-2, which is not a "real" 3-button, 4-buttons are nowhere to be seen), the buttons were very high (the Neapolitan suit has high buttons, but much lower than the buttons on the suits of the early 1900s), and the shirts had high paper collars, which are nowhere to be seen. And the hats?
There is nothing current that recalls the clothing of those times.
The clothing in "Peaky Blinders," which is a decade older, is something like a fedora nowadays, please.
A similar line of thinking was popular in jiu jitsu, where veterans said that being competent with the gi was necessary to be competent in no-gi. Yet current no-gi winners basically never train with the gi.