There are two types of history to be discussed here.

One, the type that is taught and state funded. This is the history that any given society is collectively supposed to know. Think about the question that asks why the US education system goes back on itself after elementary school to clarify the inaccurate facts that are taught at an elementary level. This type of history is intended for a wider audience, and is meant at its best to spread knowledge of how our societies function and came to be, and at its worst meant to direct a narrative for a generation to follow without much introspection.

The second type of history is the kind that comes from the direct research of primary resources in order to make sense of why certain things have happened in the past. This type of history (historiography, "doing history") is not about memorizing anything, it is about putting pieces together about questions we don't know the answer to yet. Then streamlining this answer into something that is palatable, easy to understand, peer-reviewed, and true to the original sources. Some of the questions here actually spark some original research or create a discussion about a topic that many may have not even considered discussing. If you study history you may know a lot of history, but a historian is somebody that researches history and creates/contributes to the understanding of our past.

I'm not really a historian, but I do consider myself a student of history and I think this is partially correct. If you're not good at memorizing names and dates, well, you're gonna have a bad time. Personally my mind works very linearly and I'm very interested in dates and it's really hard for me to understand events in history when I don't know the exact timeframe in which they happened in relation to other events. The first thing I do when trying to learn about a new subject is usually make a rough year by year or month by month timeline of the main events that happened so I can make sense of it all and put it in context. Names are also very important because knowing who was doing what and when can be essential to understanding events. Obviously there is much more to the study of history, like lots of critical thinking and source analysis, but I'd say memorizing dates and names and knowing what they mean and how they relate to each other is indeed extremely important and very much ties into those other things.