It’s the foundation of a lot more than just physics.

It’s absolutely crucial to economics and business, and it is a travesty that it isn’t a required part of lower division curriculum. You cannot grasp micro/macro/applied/business economics without understanding relationships between changing variables.

Understanding calculus helps you understand much more deeply than you could have grasped form just learning algebra what kinds of numerical relationship problems it is possible to actually figure out. Ideally you also need some infinite series, some linear algebra, some combinatorics, and an appreciation of complex numbers as well, so the absence of deep coverage of those from a typical high school math curriculum in favor of putting calculus on a pedestal is more annoying.

But the idea that if you know how the rate of change of a thing changes over time, that that gives you enough information to understand it completely? That’s pretty important and deep.

When I studied Calculus in high school, it was taught via mathematical proofs and concepts. I didn't really "get it" and struggled to keep a C average...until that one day I was working on a problem in the library about water draining from a pool it hit me that "it's about rate of change!". That was it...that concept changed Calculus from some weird math thing to something I could understand and get my head around.

It also underscored the poor teaching methods at my school. I was somewhat vindicated by being the only person in my class to get a 5 on the AP test. I also ended up in a major where I did almost nothing but calculus for undergrad and grad work.