I always hated memorization and thought I wasn't very good at it. Still not good with names, dates, etc. OTOH, I can't help but notice that I would bike and car magazines when I was a teen and could recite back every important figure to do with those vehicles - dry weight, HP, torque, brands of carburetors and FI systems, etc. So I suspect it was more a matter of just being lazy to do the memorization, and nobody ever really forced me.
I did memorize the times tables, like most people. I would hope that kids still do, at least up to 10x10, as it's pretty hard to do any kind of arithmetic without a calculator without knowing that. Then again, I don't know how to do square roots, or cacluate sine and cosine, or logarithms, or any of that stuff, either manually or with a slide rule. At one time those would have been considered essential for anyone going into science or engineering.
School House Rock was based on kids could remember the lyrics to their favorite songs but could not remember dates or other information.
Conjunction Junction whats your function?