More things in memory also leads to making more connections / recognizing more types of patterns more easily.

There are things that you just see/know/recognize that are not easily searchable/promptable because the fact that you should be searching/prompting would not occur if you had not seen the pattern before.

One could argue "experience" is just the accumulation of memory such that you can recognize more patterns more rapidly, short circuiting bad decisions before they are made. With LLMs its even more important to have a well tuned "what should be getting built" mental framework if that becomes our primary job.

There's memorising and there's memorising.

My history lessons at school were entirely "here's 30 dates of these important events happening, there will be a test at the end of the month where you have to name the event at each of the given dates". I just remember sitting there trying to somehow remember what happened on each of those random dates, what event was it that I knew nothing about with zero context other than the fact that it happened. I can confidently say that after I ended my formal education I remember 0 of any of those dates. That approach to teaching history is just completely wrong, I would have loved to be told WHY certain things happened not just when they happened, but the system wasn't designed for it.

But maths formulas or even chemistry and physics - yes, that makes a lot of sense because you need to remember them and then you can actually use them to solve problems later.

Rote memorization is very ineffective way to memorize things. That is why it was downvoted.