I have a high IQ and some combination of low key autism and ADHD which hinder my memory to some extent. I've gone my whole career finding the status quo way of doing things overengineered. I keep my stuff simple and I always see the team around me drowning in bugs and redesigns from their overcomplicated and unnecessary layers of abstraction and indirection that don't match how the business needs have evolved. I don't write a line of code until it's needed, and I find maintenance and extension of my code to be easy.

Well, I don't think that's memory dependent. I have an exceptional working and long term memory (and now I am not ashamed to admit it) and people around me cook up some really stupid solutions. Premature abstraction, overreach, focusing on the wrong things, etc.

These matters are always problems of organization, and of prioritizing what the job is, what are the inputs/outputs, how do you efficiently parameterize them into messages and data packets, where do they go and how will you send it, etc.

I assume you are not yet 40.

https://neurolaunch.com/cognitive-development-in-middle-adul...

Some "facts" about humans, programming and the rest is likely just what happens as the brain ages and the nondeterministics and arbitrary preferences.