Not really. Before google, we had (and still have) books. What the internet and later google changed was the availability of information (If I had to rely on libraries and bookstores, I'd never be a programmer today). The job was never about memorizing knowledge, only the application of it. That has not changed since the dawn of computing.
Sort of. As a developer I had my stack of reference books, man pages, etc. I’d try hard to memorize syntax as it was a pain to look things up. And I also devoted some memory to remembering where in a book to look, which set of man pages to use, etc
With google that mostly went to the wayside. I just needed to know something existed and I could pull together far more information faster than I was spending before to just do quick lookups
I didn’t say the job was about memorization back then. Rather I found that each of these new abstraction layers made it easier to go broad with one’s on hand knowledge instead of deep
