[Barrin92]

Strong memory is almost always an indicator of exceptional skill. Whether it's chess players, musicians, writers or poets, mathematicians or also programmers, people who excel generally have astonishing ability to recall.

That's not an accident. Wisdom emerges out of practice and the effortlessness that comes with it. The genius piano player isn't that good because of some pie in the sky wisdom about music, just like the AI they just played tons of scales and training pieces. Literally meaningless stuff. This rejection of rote memorization as some sort of lower skill, that students should be 'smart and lazy' is one of the stupidest modern tendencies.