The trauma of burning your hand on a hot pan creates a memory you won’t soon forget, but almost no one would understand it as an act of memorization.
Memorization to me refers to a set of cargo-culty “learning” practices wherein we believe that by using language to drill exposure to an abstract representation of a concept, that somehow we will absorb the concept itself.
We do this mainly because experts suck at empathizing with learners and fail to understand that the symbol has meaning for them but not for the learner.
It’s the difference between drilling vocabulary flashcards and actually reading, listening, or talking to someone.
Young children do not use vocab flashcards to learn their L1. They aren’t being “drilled” to learn “mama.” They have actual needs in an actual social context and attend to nuanced details of that context to make complex statistical inferences about the world, their perceptions, and their body. Mostly subconsciously.
Yes, there are specific areas where drilling can help us accelerate or catch up. Many kids seem to need explicit phonetics instruction in order to make the leap to reading words. Phonological speech interventions are often drill-like. Practicing musical scales does make you more fluent in improvisation. Drilling the mechanics of a repertoire piece frees your mind to focus on higher-order expression and interpretation. They’re valuable, they have a place.
But this is just a small slice of learning. It’s disproportionately important for passing tests (And getting hired at tech companies!), which to me is the crux of the issue.
If I had to reformulate OP’s argument to something I can get behind, it would be more about deliberate practice or “putting in the reps.” This is also often boring, and differentiates highly successful people from average performers. But it’s a broader and more purposeful set of activities than “memorization” would imply.