What gets rewarded in mathematics is what other mathematicians respect. What other mathematicians respect is math that is hard, rigorous, and abstract. So that's the type of math they teach because the people who do well in modern mathematics are the people who excel at that style of math.

For what it's worth there are fields of mathematics that are taught well and that are very concrete. They also tend to be lower prestige. I'm particularly fond of numerical analysis. Nick Trefethen at Oxford put out a good series of lectures from his course that is understandable to anyone who remembers the basics of calculus and linear algebra: https://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/series/scientific-computing-dphil-....