Like you said, none of these folks are deriving God's Algorithm[0] in their heads in the planning stages. I haven't been in the game for a while but I'm pretty sure people are all still doing CFOP[1] but getting better at lookahead, execution, and some of the advanced tricks like x-cross[2], and a bunch of gnarly last-layer tricks[3]. Some of which include memorizing thousands of algorithms.
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Like you said, none of these folks are deriving God's Algorithm[0] in their heads in the planning stages. I haven't been in the game for a while but I'm pretty sure people are all still doing CFOP[1] but getting better at lookahead, execution, and some of the advanced tricks like x-cross[2], and a bunch of gnarly last-layer tricks[3]. Some of which include memorizing thousands of algorithms.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God%27s_algorithm
[1] https://jperm.net/3x3/cfop
[2] https://jperm.net/3x3/cfop/cross
[3] https://jperm.net/3x3/cfop/ll