Learning a language? Vocabulary and grammar. Learning chemistry? Periodic table. Learning math? Addition and subtraction, and later proofs, graphs, and equations. Baseball? Throwing and catching. Music? Scales and arpeggios. Drawing? Lines.

And history? Yeah, those dates and facts and terms are foundational. If you don't have a baseline understanding of the timeline of human history, your thinking is going to be muddled at best. You can't do Regency historiography if you can't tell the difference between the Georges.

There is absolutely no field of human endeavor that doesn't have a steep learning curve full of dull and tedious tasks that need to be repeated and repeated and repeated.

This isn't subjective and does not rely on whether this or that person finds it "engaging" or "fascinating." What matters is if the baseline work gets done. That work is ultimately what the educator is being paid (and should be paid 4 or 5 times more) to facilitate.

The fact you keep coming back to personal likes and dislikes - it shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the mechanics of education. English teachers don't teach Gatsby because they personally love it and are trying to impose their tastes on everyone else, and history teachers aren't bad at their jobs when they make people memorize dates instead of do a Dead Poets' Society monologue about how cool history is. Pre-college education is about fundamentals, and there is absolutely no getting around the fact those fundamentals are not going to spark joy in every student every day.