I never said you shouldn't
understand what it does. It's just that I think it's useless to drill on arithmetic.
I know very well what a computer is doing when I tell it to divide 188416 by 20148. That doesn't mean it's useful for me to be able to mentally do it.
Mental arithmetic is incredibly overvalued and useless as a skill, especially since it's largely uncorrelated with actual depth of mathematical understanding.