Was learning easy to look up facts ever slam dunk useful?
It had its place in the 80s when looking up involved at least finding the right book. But that time was already on the way out in the 00s. My impression was more that education likes to ask for facts because they are easy to test for.
What you really want to teach are concepts and broad strokes. Nobody needs to know on which weekday the Soviet Union collapsed, but an understanding of the causes of the collapse is useful. Similarly, you don't need to know the speed of light to more than one digit of precision, but knowing the role of the speed of light as the speed at which information can travel through space is useful
That kind of knowledge also continues being useful in the age of AI. It allows you to see the connections in the world, and know which questions you even have to ask
You need to be able to hold facts in your own working memory while you think about them. If you do this with the same facts, and think through different combinations, they’ll stick in your memory for longer.
I never sat down to memorise trivia about the Roman calendar, but I know Julius Caesar was assassinated on the 15th, the ides of March, because of repeated exposure while thinking things through.
It seems like old assessment techniques could luck in to testing comprehension, because the people who understood things would also remember them. This devolved into the recall being seen as the goal, instead of as proxy measure of something harder to test.
Hey you wrote out my general thoughts on the subject pretty damn well :)