> In the long run, if your knowledge is situated within a context and connected to other things you know (because you learned by doing) then I believe you'll understand it much better. Memorizing by rote, out of context, will help you to recall facts which often don't have any meaning to you.

I feel it's worth mentioning that the creator of SuperMemo agrees with you here. "Learn before you memorize" (Rule 2 in [0]). Learn the information, then commit portions to an SRS tool to keep them more effectively memorized and recallable.

[0] https://www.supermemo.com/en/articles/20rules