Thomas Shey
Legend
So here is a thought for you to interact with.
When you're a lead climber, there is kit that you pack out. Now this isn't offloaded onto automaticity in the way that (say) a morning drive might be (such that you get to work and you experience the peculiar cognitive state of having no recollection of the duration of the drive)...but when you're tenured and capable, the second nature of it becomes not terribly far afield once you've organized and packed out and put on and deployed your kit enough times.
Same thing goes when you're on the wall/face and you're developing (in real time) or deploying beta (the charted course/procedures/techniques necessary to ascend a climb). Now this development and deployment of beta is effectively "consulting your accumulated memory/knowledge" or, in D&D parlance, "a knowledge check."
All of this is to say that if you're tenured and capable, the cognitive state of pulling from your kit the thing you need (because you know you packed it) and pulling from your memory/knowledge the thing you need to ascend this climb (because you've metaphorically "packed it") is experientially pretty close to the same thing.
Transition to D&D Adventurer or a Blades Crew member. Is there really a huge swathe of daylight between these folks adventuring or heisting and a lead climber working a wall/face?
You can very much argue not (though I'd argue unless the heists are very consistent in what tools they need that there's some differences--and if they aren't, then it questions the need to fill after-the-fact. I think the differences are enough there that, in fact, that's usually what justifies the after-the-fact fill mechanic), but my argument here is that knowing what's in your kit is less uncertain than whether you will know the answer to a knowledge check, because your "kit" in the latter case is intrinsically more incomplete (unless its a very narrow and basic subject, in which case there should be no check in the first place.) One is far more deterministic from the get-go with people who's kit is literally life or death (and where its often pretty consistent from one time to the next).