>I try to focus on extracting the nature and patterns of relationships, instead of the specific details.

You're a mapper, like me. The only reason I ever want to learn details is if they are important corner cases.

>In tech this can be an obstacle when communicating because many engineers have an extremely fine-grained memory, seemingly all the time.

Those folks are packers, they know all the corner cases, and worry incessantly about them.

Google "mappers vs packers" to learn more, far more.