My counterpoint is that I know a good amount of people who have a ton of parroted knowledge, and know nothing of how to apply it. I know far, far, fewer people

My counterpoint is that I know a good amount of people who have a ton of parroted knowledge, and know nothing of how to apply it. I know far, far, fewer people who know how to apply knowledge. There are even fewer people who can start applying freshly acquired knowledge within the same day. A mindless search engine can parrot and rattle off 50 probability distributions. Only a human can tell you the implications of a specific distribution emerging from your data. Google and DuckDuckGo are free, I don't need to hire someone who can do the same as a search engine. My opinion of what you refer to as learning, is that it is the absence of learning. It is one of the longest held misconceptions, spanning hundreds of years. It is why we need to retrain everyone fresh out of college. It is why junior vs. senior roles exist. Juniors have all of the rote knowledge and no practical experience. Seniors have immense practical experience and have probably long forgotten all the rote knowledge. The latter gets paid vastly more, the latter is far rarer.