This post resonates with me: i never really learnt much about javac and haven't needed it in about ~5 years while working with Java daily - for the most part, working with Ant/Maven/Grade is enough and is actually more important to know, whereas javac errors during build can mostly be addressed with a quick StackOverflow search.
Knowledge about the lower level stuff is probably nice to have, yet not really needed to be productive in a professional capacity within the industry, unless you're not using any sort of a build system (a red flag, if you expect to manage dependencies easily), or are doing something more advanced and specific. It's like using a Linux distro daily but not really knowing how to or caring for compiling your own software - when the Wi-Fi drivers fail to work in new hardware that'll probably become relevant, but otherwise not necessarily.
However, i'd also like to go into the opposite direction and warn against the dangers of not introducing students to higher level tools like IDEs and linters properly. I was one of the unfortunate few who were also taught Java in university and had to write it on paper, as well as in Eclipse/NetBeans. The problem was that none of the staff ever introduced us to the actual capabilities of the IDE, or told us about alternatives like the JetBrains products, or talked about readability or refactoring at all (neither in Bachelor's, nor Master's courses in CS).
Thus, i saw some students write code without readable indentation, comments or understandable variable names, treating the entire Java language like some pseudo assembler and happily ignoring any and all of the IDEs suggestions to fix errors or improve the way their code was written. Not only that, but they were also not familiar with any of the refactoring tools, even the more basic ones like extracting a variable or a method, or renaming variables, or even code generation capabilities like getters/setters, equals/hashCode, toString, constructors/builders and so on.
To them, these IDEs were just like using Vim at a very basic capacity - knowing how to enter the insert mode and not much more, thus gaining no actual benefit from the tool in the first place, though actually working in the industry would probably teach this to them, due to the necessity to follow code style guides or refactor code in legacy codebases.
Knowledge about the lower level stuff is probably nice to have, yet not really needed to be productive in a professional capacity within the industry, unless you're not using any sort of a build system (a red flag, if you expect to manage dependencies easily), or are doing something more advanced and specific. It's like using a Linux distro daily but not really knowing how to or caring for compiling your own software - when the Wi-Fi drivers fail to work in new hardware that'll probably become relevant, but otherwise not necessarily.
However, i'd also like to go into the opposite direction and warn against the dangers of not introducing students to higher level tools like IDEs and linters properly. I was one of the unfortunate few who were also taught Java in university and had to write it on paper, as well as in Eclipse/NetBeans. The problem was that none of the staff ever introduced us to the actual capabilities of the IDE, or told us about alternatives like the JetBrains products, or talked about readability or refactoring at all (neither in Bachelor's, nor Master's courses in CS).
Thus, i saw some students write code without readable indentation, comments or understandable variable names, treating the entire Java language like some pseudo assembler and happily ignoring any and all of the IDEs suggestions to fix errors or improve the way their code was written. Not only that, but they were also not familiar with any of the refactoring tools, even the more basic ones like extracting a variable or a method, or renaming variables, or even code generation capabilities like getters/setters, equals/hashCode, toString, constructors/builders and so on.
To them, these IDEs were just like using Vim at a very basic capacity - knowing how to enter the insert mode and not much more, thus gaining no actual benefit from the tool in the first place, though actually working in the industry would probably teach this to them, due to the necessity to follow code style guides or refactor code in legacy codebases.