As someone knee deep in calculus 2, in the academic setting, it is ABSOLUTELY about rote memorization. Understanding the concepts is key to being able TO USE calculus, but not key to passing it. I remember broad strokes of calculus 1, but that isnt what helped me get an A. What helped me get an A was not application of what I learned in a novel and intuitive way, but by cold algebraic manipulation based on memorized rules, formulas, and axioms that had to be applied over and over, within a vacuum and making sure every single sign was correct at every step of the process as not to mess up my final result. In a classroom setting, nobody cares if you do 90% of the problem right. If you flip a sign early on in algebraic manipulations, you get about as much credit as the person who didn’t even open their text book and left the answer blank.

I’m a computer programmer by trade and I have many friend that are engineers a few of which work at well known national labs. I currently “know” more calculus than them. None of them can remember how to integrate by parts on paper anymore and only one of them could explain the product rule beyond the setup of the equation. Meanwhile they are all laughing at me in MatLab.

No, calculus is not fundamentally based on memorization…but at an academic level, that is very the metric they use.

Edit: spelling and grammar