That's not dissimilar from my experience, one of my favorite "I'm so glad I know how trig works" moments was for a data visualization class I had, I wanted to animate a little rocket ship orbiting the earth. I can't fully remember the exact math I used, but it was so gratifying to realize that I could use trig to convert rotational degrees per second into a point in space that I could draw my icon at (as well as the angle to tilt the image).

One of my hobbies is 3d printing and I do a bunch of my own modeling, so trig pops up there pretty regularly too.