Creativity fundamentally comes from memorization?

No studies are cited. The assertions are corroborated by the author's personal experience.

Take its claims with a grain of salt.

Only if your goals don’t include being able to speak or write.

> You can’t be serious advocating “just go read stuff”

True, not “just.” And Chinese is particularly tricky because the ideograms convey little to no phonetic information. Even so, almost any activity I can imagine seems superior to traditional flashcards. Photo flashcards (vs. translation), listening along to highlighted text or closed captions, deciphering street signs or memes, even the written drills you mentioned. (Or better, “write 5 phrases that all start with character X”). Our brains crave meaning, and flashcards offer very little of it.

> even native speakers learn them by repetition

No argument there, most everything is learned by repetition, but I’m interested in context. Native speakers already know the verbal form of most words they’re learning to write, even in Chinese. I’d argue the meaning is stronger.

> life of a toddler is vastly different than an adult

True. The scale of their learning tasks are much bigger than ours. They have to learn that they exist, that their family exists, that they can vocalize, that language is a thing, that they want and need things, and that they can get them by communicating.

> An adult has much less time for that

I think this is a good entry point to the core of the issue for me—-small children don’t “set aside time to learn,” they just learn. You and I do this also, though it’s less novel and flexible and therefore maybe less salient. I think we place too much value on structured or synthetic learning as “real” learning when in fact it’s often extremely inefficient compared to our natural learning tendencies.

There’s a spectrum of structure, starting with what we choose to pay attention to, to an open-ended “study time,” to guided classroom activities, to timed math drills. Flashcards are at the extreme reductivist end of that spectrum. I suspect we like them because they’re easy to understand, uniform, predictable, and convenient to create and use. Creating more effective learning opportunities and supports is substantially harder, but generally worthwhile IMO.

They "stretch" it to its dictionary definition?

>The trauma of burning your hand on a hot pan creates a memory you won’t soon forget, but almost no one would understand it as an act of memorization

It still is a kind of memorization, just not a voluntary one. And such learning is still is a very important function of mental development and evolutionary fitness, that shouldn't just be shunned "because trauma".

>Memorization to me refers to a set of cargo-culty “learning” practices wherein we believe that by using language to drill exposure to an abstract representation of a concept, that somehow we will absorb the concept itself

Well, I see your cargo cult and I raise you tried-and-true.

"Absorbing the concept itself" might take more effort (including personal, for logistical reasons, not everything can be tailored to the individual learner, who might not even care enough for learning compared to all kinds of diversions, and have zero passion for the subjects, even if a clone with the teaching skills of Feynman with the presentation skills of Tonny Robbins, and the passionate conviction of Jean D' Arc was to present it to them.

But absorbing the concept is not enough, there needs to be instant recall, or at least fast enough recall) of all kinds of facts and factoids and tables, and also this "absorbing" also needs to encompass boring concepts, that are nonetheless crucial, if one is to be succesful in anything technical or scientific, or generally creative in any sort of organized way that combines concepts and information (not just Jackson Pollocking away).