If you memorize all sorts of things, people treat you like they do people with good memories in other subjects, as a resource to help them recall what they need. If you need books and tables and cheat sheets, that's also fine. I have a mediocre memory for details and I did fine with chemistry. If I had a genuine memory problem, but could succeed with notes, I don't doubt that I could have gotten a special dispensation from the school. I suspect that's not the case with a lot of students who complain.

General chemistry is hard because people have difficulty with the math that they told themselves they would never need to use in the future. Algebra, logarithms, etc.

If you never learn to balance an equation, however, you will never succeed. Similarly, you will get low grades if you cannot solve an equilibrium problem, which requires algebra, logarithms, and a calculator. If you can't do equilibria, you can't do acid-base problems. If you are expected to know a few reactions for the exam, not memorizing them will probably leave you in a bad place. This is the same as for other subjects, as said above with physiology. Is it fair? I don't know, school is like that. I would say, though, that a lot of General Chemistry represents things that people do every day in Chemistry, and also represents the historical understanding of chemistry until about 1850. There's also some stuff in there about analyzing chemicals to determine what is there.

Organic chemistry is a little different. Organic compounds are quite varied and do many interesting things. They are soluble in many different substances, many of which are organic chemicals themselves. They react in often surprising ways with each other and with inorganic compounds. They may react to heat and light, or even just agitating or dropping them. There's a lot to say in the subject. So the education is focused on covering a wide array of substances and reaction types, and trying to show where general properties apply and the limits of generalization. In addition, there is a large analytic component because, as you might expect, a lot of compounds do not exist in isolation and need to be identified and quantified. As a (veterinary) physician, I don't think you can really do medicine properly without grokking OChem. You don't need to do reactions yourself, but if it looks like an alien language, then a lot of the information we have about drugs and physiology won't make sense to you.

People find OChem hard because it's a lot to learn in a small amount of time, and they don't put in the work. I think that the majority of students at my undergrad school could have succeeded if they put in 20 hours a week and did all the problems in the back of the book, which is what I did. The test is really checking to see if you have seen the thing before, and the only way to do that is to expose yourself to it.

Maybe OChem is the Leetcode of the med school admissions process. The MCAT certainly has some OChem, as well as Physics, Biology and Biochemistry. And, I'll be honest, if studying hard enough to get an A in four courses while spending 20 hours a week on 1 of them is difficult, med school is probably not the right choice. I went through undergrad twice and the first time through I would not have pulled that off.