Well, some of us disagree with those people :) Plus there is memorization and memorization. People that tend to deny it seem to think that what the grammar camp of language learning does is just learning tables of words and forms with no context which cannot be further away from reality if they tried. I do not doubt that there are bad teachers and bad materials doing that but... Use something enough and you do not need to memorize it the way you would memorize your address for example - it just gets imprinted in your brain.

The teacher that helped me learn English had only 3 basic rules: write each new word a lot (5 lines in your notebook was her requirement on the first 1500 or so; 3 later on... - the idea is to pronounce the word and its translation while writing it, not to watch TV and just mechanically write it of course), do drill exercises for each new grammar point until you know it even in the middle of the night (plus adding the all new grammar points to the old ones and do even more drills and exercises) and write a lot (copy the lesson, copy all exercises (not just the answers).

All that was before SRS was widely available (although making your own paper-based SRS was a normal practice of course - I still do that occasionally when working on vocabulary).