This is great food for thought.

I think part of the reason memorization/procedural memory/fluency/automaticity get a bad rap is we're kindof trying to thread this very tight needle.

We want students to be automatic with lots of skills, because that sets up the building blocks to do other more complex skills.

But also that procedural memory can be overgeneralized and have to be unlearned in a new context. I'm seeing that right now with students who keep saying 4 - 7 = 3, they overgeneralized their subtraction learning and now are unlearning that as we get into negatives.

And also forgetting exists, and it's important to have some declarative knowledge to "rebuild" procedural skills when they get rusty. I taught high school for 6 years and got very good at trigonometry, but I haven't taught it in 5 years. I'm sure I could still do a lot of trigonometry, but it's rusty and I would need a lot of declarative knowledge to put the pieces back together. That type of declarative knowledge is useful, students need that too!

Building strong procedural knowledge takes a lot of time and practice, so we want to take shortcuts. There's also a prioritization question: if you're a teacher whose students are a bit behind, you don't have time to reteach everything. What do you prioritize?

Students who are missing or shaky with different procedural skills are going to struggle to develop more complex procedural skills, so it's tempting to try and do the "follow these steps" approach you describe that feels like a big dead end.

As teachers we typically have more expertise, which means it's hard to peer inside our own heads and understand all these relationships.

The thing I find interesting is why, over and over again, people struggle to understand these relationships. I find them very important! And I think it's just because we're trying to thread this needle, there are lots of ways for the needle to go awry, and procedural memory gets blamed.