Most math majors I knew hated the standard calculus courses, for precisely this reason. It's taught this way because they're targeting engineers and some hard sciences (physics).

The reason is that for many of those majors (EE, physics), you will take courses where doing calculus is your daily bread and butter. You need to be as adept at it as algebra. Over 50% of HW problems in those courses will involve calculus. They really don't want students who understand circuits but can't do anything useful because they stumble on calculus.

They are the largest "customers" of the math department, so the department caters to them.