People like to dismiss memorization because you can only use it to solve very simple problems, but someone once gave me the analogy that to "you can't write a symphony without having memorized all the notes first", and I've found that to be a great analogy. By memorizing the simple stuff, you can tackle the hard stuff.
I depends what you mean by "memorization". All learning requires memory so with an expansive definition all learning is "memorization".
But if one means pure rote memorization, I think the value depends very much on the field. Writing English requires knowledge of the spellings of words since English spellings are fairly arbitrary. A student can benefit from memorizing multiplication table to 10 but they'd do better learning principles than memorization multiplication up 100 or 1000. And many of principles, terminologies and rules of thumb are best remembered in-context.
One thing to consider is that "memory training" approaches can be effectively used to remember long arbitrary sequences of data (the arrangement of a deck of playing cards or whatever) through adding colorful/memorable (but arbitrary) associations.
But such methods are seldom actually used by practitioners of memory intensive fields. Usually such practitioners need to recall facts and ideas in context and so they achieve a high recall naturally, by associations facts and ideas with each other.
