Coming from the other side of this argument: In my degree, rote memorization was required for a surprising amount of courses. It required students, me included, to memorize huge quantities of things we knew were utterly irrelevant to anything but being graded. (This prediction remained true). Committing irrelevant course work into memory over and over again almost burned me out, certainly made me lose all interest and fun in learning for over a decade afterwards. To be honest, I still feel slightly burned and that might never go away.

You might have attended a good degree, where the learned information was actually beneficial. But I'd bet for most degrees out there, rote memorization is the consequence of professors wanting easily gradable exams, existing for their benefit, not the students.

Which means the actual problem is low quality education and degrees and we might find common ground here.