[cakes]

Personally - I write aliases locally that I know I don't need/can live without remotely (e.g. "vi" aliases to "vim" because sometimes I fail to get that "m" on there and I want vim but only on my laptop), I can't imagine writing "system-wide" things as an alias without losing some sleep.

I'd agree with the concept of memorizing it in theory but I'm with you that it becomes a bit too much when the tooling differences in switches from command to command can be even minimally different (something as simple as scp "-P" vs ssh "-p" is easy to forget in the moment). Yeah, I can memorize that example but everything has flags for everything and they can be vastly different (like you mentioned sort vs. cut)