In 1995 I "invented" Navigation Meshes. But I didn't call them Navigation meshes because I didn't learn the term until I read about them in AI Game Programming Wisdom in 2004 (a book published in 2002).
Likewise there are plenty of people who have learned database design through a combination of optimizing execution plans and dealing with the practicalities of schema changes. Such people may never have heard the term "Third Normal Form", but will run absolute rings around a college newbie who has. Indeed, in my career I have met at least two people responsible for database design who did know normal forms but did not know about execution plans, or covering indexes for that matter. Or had a nice normal set of tables, and then proceeded to build a reservation system (hit by 100,000+ users when registration opens) that takes a transactional lock on a single row using an ORM. They understood database theory from 1971, but they didn't know what this specific database implementation actually does.
Perhaps, yeah. Likewise there will be people who've never heard of Big-O notation, and when asked to explain the efficiency of their algorithm and justify why it's optimal they won't be able to, even though they're masterful algorithm builders and did get the optimal solution. Or people who know to build a solution that isn't optimal in theory, but harnesses caches, parallelism, and other real-world features of a computer to be the most effective. And they'll still get docked points on interviews, where a bored engineer is just sitting there looking for someone to regurgitate the right answers. If we're going to take a stand against database questions, I feel like it'd be disingenuous to not do the same against algorithms questions.
Likewise there are plenty of people who have learned database design through a combination of optimizing execution plans and dealing with the practicalities of schema changes. Such people may never have heard the term "Third Normal Form", but will run absolute rings around a college newbie who has. Indeed, in my career I have met at least two people responsible for database design who did know normal forms but did not know about execution plans, or covering indexes for that matter. Or had a nice normal set of tables, and then proceeded to build a reservation system (hit by 100,000+ users when registration opens) that takes a transactional lock on a single row using an ORM. They understood database theory from 1971, but they didn't know what this specific database implementation actually does.