It's not true that you don't understand/learn by "storing raw information". The Human brain is incapable of not understanding information. And even if there is

It's not true that you don't understand/learn by "storing raw information". The Human brain is incapable of not understanding information. And even if there is nothing to understand in the data we try to memorize, we rather make something up to memorize it rather than forget it (what you have to do in order to use the memory palace on numbers, for example). In many subjects, rote memorization is the only route to real understanding. I'd like to name medicine, biology, law and languages. Only be memorization, over weeks and years of relentless learning and just as much forgetting, the mental infrastructure of an expert is forged. I can't cite it off hand, but there are even studies that compared understanding between students using a memory palace technique and those without. The former understood more.