The point is, a couple of anecdotes don’t prove the rule. You might not find GPS useful, but a lot of people find it immensely useful and revolutionary.

If your use case is travelling to a new place once or twice and never again, there is no point memorising the route / area.

Memorising a route doesn’t help you figure out there is an accident on the route, or unusually heavy traffic.

I don’t disagree with you about memorising common routes and learning about your local area, it’s a good thing to do imo. It’s just no longer required because technology is good enough to let you get by without having to do that.