I absolutely agree there's a minimum baseline you need, but my argument is more that I feel like, from my experiences in academia, a lot of it, particularly in

I absolutely agree there's a minimum baseline you need, but my argument is more that I feel like, from my experiences in academia, a lot of it, particularly in intro courses, is often focused around verbatim memorization as a proxy for knowing how to use the rote memorized thing, and while I've always been quite good at rote memorization, other people often are not, and get filtered by those classes. e.g. I saw several intro CS courses filter people who couldn't write Java or C code cold with precisely correct syntax, and baseline physics classes filter people who couldn't keep a bunch of identities memorized well, when I claim that neither of those is directly useful as a skill in most circumstances, or necessary in the problem domain.