> When modern search became more available, a lot of people said there's no point of rote memorization as you can just do a Google search. That's more or less accepted today.

And those people are wrong, in a similar way to how it's wrong to say: "There's no point in having very much RAM, as you can just page to disk."

It's the cognitive equivalent of becoming morbidly obese (another popular decision in today's world).