Memorization has its place, such as with medicine or language learning. But the issue most people are referring to when deriding memorization is about memorization that is done for the sake of busy work alone.
In school I was tested on memorizing a map and drawing precise borders, rivers etc and various acronyms that were obsolete even at that time. They added 0 value to my education, except as unnecessary stress in having to memorize them. Similarly with being expected to memorize various physics and math theorems such that understanding was treated as having zero value (that is, if your wording isn't exactly the same as in the textbook, it doesn't matter if your answer is actually perfectly correct in terms of understanding). It was to the point of being prescribed several arbitrary essays to memorize, with one of them being randomly expected to be reproduced in an exam.
None of that added any value, most of it turned out to be hilariously divorced from real life expectations.
Even with your disingenuous example of language learning. People who argue that they don't need to learn the language because they can just use a translation app are making the point that they aren't interested in learning the language and have limited enough need to interact in it to get by with just a translator. Anyone who has actually interacted with a language they don't know understands that translation software doesn't obsolete knowing a language.