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I've never come across a situation where I've been writing music with some other people and felt the urge to go "Okay fellas, I think this section of the bridge should be contained within the Phrygian mode". I could see that being useful or practical in maybe a jazz band with a dozen or more members,
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I don't understand. Why a dozen or more? The mode you play in jazz is the mode you play whether you're soloing, dueting, trio, quartet, etc. Doesn't matter how many people there are. And, yes, jazz musicians make great use of modes in every possible way. D Dorian, for example, is very common. Miles Davis's "So What" requires the bass to play D Dorian. It's a minor mode but it's NOT a minor scale and that's a very important distinction. So if you're playing a piece and the leader tells you, "It's D Dorian." You have to know what that means. You start playing in D minor and you're going to be sent home because you'll be playing out of tune. Even a mediocre jazz musician knows how to play D Dorian.
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but in most areas of music I think musicians are making a conscious effort to avoid boxing themselves into rigid theoretical structures, concerning yourself primarily with theory when writing music seems to harm creativity more than bolster it.
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That is simply not true. If you write your ideas down, you SEE it and it inspires enhancing the melody and fleshing it out. When you write with a guitar on your lap trying to come up with something and you find yourself making the same predictable chord changes, try writing it down and looking at those notes and all sorts of ideas start flowing. But you have to know your scales, chords and modes.
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So I don't think you missed much, besides maybe something to bull**** about with pretentious music students over a glass of wine at a jazz concerto (no offense to genuinely brilliant jazz musicians), you seem to be doing just fine without the tedious nomenclature.
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What about actually PLAYING the music rather than discussing it with a bunch of pretentious music students (which you will NEVER find at a jazz gig)? I can play by ear AND off the sheet. When you can write it down or read it off the sheet, it ADDS a dimension to you musical vocabulary. It's absurd to think it would detract. That's like saying knowing differential calculus hurts structural engineers more than it helps. It may be beyond the intellectual grasp of hacks but it is essential to an engineer. I wouldn't dare drive over a bridge built by an engineer who didn't have his theory down.