It's more useful than that, even.

There are also times where the problem isn't necessarily memorization, but just lapse of insight that makes it hard to realize that a problem as presented matches one of your pre-canned equations, even though it can be solved with one of them. Panic sets in, etc.

In situations like that, particularly in those years when you have calculus and various transforms in your toolkit (even if they aren't strictly /expected/), you can solve the problem with those power tools instead, and having understood and being able to derive solutions to closely related problems from basic principles ought to be fairly predictive of you being able to generate a correct answer in those situations.