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SilentCal comments on Is semiotics bullshit? - Less Wrong
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I think this is the field's key once-nontrivial insight: that symbolism is powerful and pervasive, and you can learn a lot by paying attention to how it works. This is approaching triviality today, but it sounds like in 1930 an automaker would think you were crazy if you said, "Instead of describing the objective qualities of your car, your ads should insinuate things about the kind of person who drives it".
I'm not convinced the impenetrable language was ever necessary or helpful to this, though.
I'd guess that they're introductions to how to actually do semiotic theory. So when you examine how to tell that 'C' signifies cold, it's like going to the first day of linear algebra and proving that x * 0 = 0; the point is that you're learning a framework. The question is whether the framework later enables you to go on to learn things you couldn't have without it.
I'm not sure that the insight you mention is "trivial" in any sense. Sure, saying "Cars are not about Transportation" may be rather trivial today, but there are a lot of "X is not about Y" insights that are a lot less obvious. If the theoretical framework of semiotics helps us with creating such insights, talking about them, perhaps validating them, that arguably is enough to see it as providing value.
The question is whether the theoretical framework of semiotics ever actually helped with such insights. Like, whether semioticians have ever achieved anything concrete that wouldn't have been possible without the triadic sign relation.