I agree that memorising things isn’t learning, but I think it’s generally understood that it is a critically important step in learning.

In technical subjects you need immediate recall of a lot of different things to be able to move onto more advanced topics.

In the humanities like history and written analytical topics like this, I would argue that memorisation of past situations etc is supposed to be the groundwork that you begin to grow your own critical thinking from. It’s not expected that you slavishly apply identical copies of what you’ve learned, they are just examples