I think there's a difference between life skills which are good for kids to have like cooking/nutrition etc, and education.
But we need more non-practical things, not fewer. The "old fashioned" syllabus was for a world where you could do the same job for 40 years.
We need to expand the set of ideas our kids can bring to bear upon a problem, and to make new things less scary, and easier to learn.
I'm old enough to have been in "old fashioned" education, and it sucked big time. Most kids came out with zero portable skills. That made them pathetically unable to cope with changes.
Consider TV repair men.
When I was a kid, we got a visit from one every few months. Most homes had a TV, so do the maths about how there were literally tens of thousands of these people. Not sure there are any left at all.
That was the ancient 1980s.
Cooking is a good life skill, and I'd wish I'd done it. But it's a truly shit job. The money is awful, the working conditions Victorian and don't even thing about career growth.
As for mechanics, cars have a lot of computers, and other electronics in them. Doubt if there is onr school in the country that teaches the necessary skills because they can't.
The ability to decompose systems into a plausible set of components is applicable to vast numbers of jobs, and not that hard to teach. Or wouldn't be if we didn't insist on having a 90% arts based curriculum.
We teach no philosophy at all unless you count the pandering to 20 different superstions we call RE. Trying to understand multiple ways of viewing the same thing is again viable and useful. But instead even at 5 DS gets fed "all viewpoints are valid".
I evaluate young people from all over the world for serious jobs. It's fair to say that British kids don't shine. They come out pretty much bottom in abstract problem solving, and when in a session the French and Chinese applicants beat the natives on expressing themselves in English, you know something is very wrong.