"everything is memorization at the end of the day"

Only somebody who has never thought about or studied human cognition would memorize such a thing. ;)

But in all seriousness, memory isn't even memory isn't just memorization. Much of it is attention, some would even say attention is all you need. ;)

In all seriousness though, arguably, reducing the human mind down to a single dimension like "recall" (or attention) while ignoring other dimensions like emotion, creativity and so on is probably good evidence that human cognition is neither simple, nor unidimensional, for some of us humans at least. Ymmv