No, it is actually a critical skill. Employers will be looking for software engineers that can orchestrate their job function and these are the two key primitives to do that.
The way it is written is to say that this is an important interview question for any software engineering position, and I'm guessing you agree by the way you say it's critical.
But by the same logic, should we be asking for the same knowledge of the language server protocol and algorithms like treesitter? They're integral right now in the same way these new tools are expected to become (and have become for many).
As I see it, knowing the internals of these tools might be the thing that makes the hire, but not something you'd screen every candidate with who comes through the door. It's worth asking, but not "critical." Usage of these tools? sure. But knowing how they're implemented is simply a single indicator to tell if the developer is curious and willing to learn about their tools - an indicator which you need many of to get an accurate assessment.
Understanding how to build an agent and how Model Context Protocol works is going to be, by my best guess, the new "what is a linked list and how do you reverse a linked list" interview question in the future. Sure, new abstractions are going to come along, which means that you could perhaps be blissfully unaware about how to do that because there's a higher order function to achieve such things. But for now, we are at the level of C and, like C, it's essential to know what those are and how to work with them.