If there's something that gets talked about a lot when learning software engineering it's understanding your basics, the basics can't be overemphasized as the most basic things can give even experienced developers nightmares.
A grasp on the basics help not just in building solutions but in debugging problems, an engineer with a firm grasps on the basics is most likely to have a rough idea of what is causing a particular problem and some leads as to how to solve the problem.
What can infinitely frustrate software engineers is when they don't have an inkling as to why an error is occurring. The basics is everything in software engineering. No matter how good you are there will be times when you have to revisit your basics however covering enough ground on it in the beginning helps in your revision.