Those that can ‘memorize lots of faxz’ really do have a huge edge in NPC world. Case in point: David Koresh (Branch Davidians in Waco) apparently had truly impressive regurgitation of Bible scriptures.
Discussion
Koresh and followers were definitely not NPCs. So I don’t see your point. Rote memorization is useful and even necessary for many high level tasks. It is just that without ability to reason logically, a person can end up like a glorified parakeet.