This is not at all what chess is. This reads to me like you don’t really play chess?

Like sure, good chess players have studied opening theory for the openings they play (and top players know at least some theory about most competitive openings), but there’s so much more to the game than simple memorization. Memorizing a bunch of lines and doing nothing else will get you nowhere with the game. Chess is about principles, concepts, ideas, strategies. It’s about tactics and positional ideas and how the two intersect. It’s about tempo and conducting the initiative. There’s a reason it’s the game with the most number of books written about it by a large margin. It’s an incredibly deep game that rewards investment and fine-tuning your own learning process (and, in fact, a great deal of unlearning bad ideas you learned earlier).

It is decidedly not a game about memorization, even if there is some amount of it involved. At high level of play, memorization (or what we simply call “prep”) is table stakes for playing the actual game. At lower levels, many players don’t know a lot of opening theory and simply rely on some combination of positional ideas, tactics, and calculation.

Do you know what rating your friend was at? In my experience, the super strong players I’ve met (including a Senior Master that occasionally visits our chess club who’s 2450 USCF or so) are incredibly intelligent and sharp. Anecdotally in my own chess career (only ~1134 USCF atm, though I think I’m a bit underrated due to my last tournament being in 2023), I’ve definitely noticed a difference in my own thinking since I started studying chess. Progressing in chess involves a lot of meta-cognitive thinking, and that kind of thing translates to all kinds of things in life.