I spent years having a negative opinion of that same "new math nonsense"; my only experience with it being viral examples of its worst excesses. But then I had kids in elementary school and saw it up close every day. It was weird and frustrating to me as a child of the 80s, but eventually I came to see that it was teaching approaches to problem solving that I was intuitively using myself. There's still rote memorization involved, but that's not the primary focus. As a result, I think it's better positioned my kids than I was at their age.