I take it you've never worked on radio systems, radar systems, satellites, or avionics then. Or with engineers working on new systems designs and modeling. (And those are just the areas I've used or seen it used by non-academics from my own experience, not at all a comprehensive list) Matlab has lots of non-academic uses, and when someone claims it's only for academics it's usually a sign that they have never used it or only saw it in their freshman "programming for engineers" class or maybe numerical methods.