[gofreddygo]

> master the methods and ideas

> ...

> That's better than memorization

Bullshit. You can't get to mastery without memorizing (at least) the fundamentals into muscle memory.

Can you just "master" the 7 notes and what octaves are and all other theory to be able to play beethoven? Or should you play a few songs repeatedly till they're muscle memory practicing in parts or full and then moving over to other songs?

Should you learn that the integral means the area under the graph to "master" integration or do you still need to run through dozens of same/similar problems till you can solve them without an error?

You need to memorize but its a fools errand to start and stop at memorizing leetcode problems. You need to get the fundamental problems (binary search, bfs, dfs, sliding window) solve them repeatedly to a point it just flows naturally and then apply it to problems that build on them and still repeat those till they get natural too.