It has more to do with not caring, honestly. I haven’t had to memorize dates since high school, no one at University cared about things like that, as they were easily looked up in books (oct 12, 1492) We concentrated more on what the person actually did and the historiography (how it is remembered/taught), prime example being the difference between how the Japanese remember the Nanjing “incident” and how the rest of the world remembers the Nanjing “massacre”
I always said that Columbus’ biggest contribution to history was that when he discovered America it stayed discovered.