While I agree that rote learning is very dull, it can be fundamental in situations where you know next to nothing of the subject at hand.
Consider for example two native English speakers, one learning German and the other learning Chinese. German grammar is way more complex than Chinese's, but because of the etymological closeness between German and English, the German student will quickly get to the point where they can easily pick up new words from the context (obviating the need for vocabulary lists), while the Chinese student will pretty much never reach that. In this type of situation an SRS is invaluable.
Regarding multiplication tables, you shouldn't forget that knowing them by heart is sometimes necessary for understanding the exciting problems. This comes up all the time in mathematics: to understand the important problems in a field, you sometimes have to get to know well a lot of seemingly boring concepts.
Knowing multiplication tables by heart is never necessary for understanding exciting problems; the exciting problems are not dependent on your arbitrary culturally-contingent choice of numeric base! I had discovered the commutative and associative properties of multiplication long before memorizing multiplication tables in fourth grade, and historically speaking, they were known long before the adoption of place-value numerical systems.
Consider for example two native English speakers, one learning German and the other learning Chinese. German grammar is way more complex than Chinese's, but because of the etymological closeness between German and English, the German student will quickly get to the point where they can easily pick up new words from the context (obviating the need for vocabulary lists), while the Chinese student will pretty much never reach that. In this type of situation an SRS is invaluable.
Regarding multiplication tables, you shouldn't forget that knowing them by heart is sometimes necessary for understanding the exciting problems. This comes up all the time in mathematics: to understand the important problems in a field, you sometimes have to get to know well a lot of seemingly boring concepts.