I'm not following -- what does it have to do with your teacher being non tech-savvy? A tech-savvy art teacher would also tell you not to trace. Tracing doesn't really help you develop your drawing skills, any reasonable art teacher would be against that.
Tracing definitely develops skills. I know many artists have traced their favorite works to get a sense of how it was put together. The trace doesn’t have any artistic value though.
Not at the level that children at schools have. Once you have the skills, you can use tracing to "research" other people's techniques but that's not something that you would be taught as you are developing the core skills because it's useless for that.
Edit: I can also see the use of tracing with very small children or beginner adults with poor motorics to develop muscle control, to learn how to control the line weight and variation. It is really ineffecient when learning how to see and understand the 3D forms, though.
Nowadays every adult can imagine that you can just scan something of a catalogue, enlarge and print on a PC. In the late 90s, there were people that had no idea this is even possible, let alone a teenager would have capability to do it.
Tracing an enlarged image can be accomplished using a box with a small hole in it and a light source. Any art teacher should have imagined that possibility in the 1890s, let alone the 1990s.
