You can be a great programmer without the formal knowledge, sure.
Learning all the math and computer science stuff is hard. And most of the time you don't need it (compared to other coding-related skills others mention), but when you do - boy oh boy it matters alot. Your simple excercise is a great example.
So on the importance - the answer is as usual 'it depends'.
I think most important, generally, is to understand how things that you use work. That includes some math, but more importantly it includes knowing how memory is managed, how the VM that's running your javascript code works and what sort of optimizations it does and so on.. Once all that knowledge fits together it feels really good to know exactly what you are doing.
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Law of diminishing returns.
You can be a great programmer without the formal knowledge, sure.
Learning all the math and computer science stuff is hard. And most of the time you don't need it (compared to other coding-related skills others mention), but when you do - boy oh boy it matters alot. Your simple excercise is a great example.
So on the importance - the answer is as usual 'it depends'.
I think most important, generally, is to understand how things that you use work. That includes some math, but more importantly it includes knowing how memory is managed, how the VM that's running your javascript code works and what sort of optimizations it does and so on.. Once all that knowledge fits together it feels really good to know exactly what you are doing.