They felt that the SICP curriculum no longer prepared engineers for what engineering is like today.
Sussman said that in the 80s and 90s, engineers built complex systems by combining simple and well-understood parts. The goal of SICP was to provide the abstraction language for reasoning about such systems.
Today, this is no longer the case. Sussman pointed out that engineers now routinely write code for complicated hardware that they don’t fully understand (and often can’t understand because of trade secrecy.)
The same is true at the software level, since programming environments consist of gigantic libraries with enormous functionality.