I don't think most students have A/B tested themselves on it. Meanwhile outside of school much is remembered without note taking, and what's not is captured for later lookup in superior ways.
Most people find it helpful. If I had a coworker on a team in a dev meeting, and they didn't take any notes, though, I'd be super suspicious they weren't going to retain all the important parts.
Sorry, bad attempt to humorously go even beyond the previous peak. ("I've never used/seen x and I don't miss it" -- so how would you even know anything about the value of x -- is a sentiment seen on many HN programming language threads.) I do occasionally take notes. For meetings specifically, notes of them tend to serve first the function of a discussion log, second as reminders either to follow up on something or to transfer anything really important to a more structured form of knowledge share like documentation, a titled google doc, or the details section of a specific work item.
Just listening doesn't work as well for most people.