Tradition was a mean to preserve knowledge over decades, I don't think it's relevant now where we can actually do that directly and also attach the research about whether it works, how it works, and how to employ a given technique directly.
Nowadays it's just a convenient method to make people do something without questioning it or asking why.
“Tradition is a set of solutions for which we have forgotten the problems. Throw away the solution and you get the problem back. Sometimes the problem has mutated or disappeared. Often it is still there as strong as it ever was.” ― Donald Kingsbury
Maybe you take a very narrow view of what constitutes a tradition as you rely on so many in your daily life that you couldn't possibly believe this view.
Why do you brush 2x a day, once in the morning and evening? You didn't learn that yourself or read any academic literature, it's because someone told you to.
Why do you eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner - 3 separate meals, and all at a consistent time? You didn't learn that yourself or read any academic literature, there's a good chance you're not even all that hungry when you grab a meal sometimes, it's because someone told you to.
Why do you say please and thank you? Or hold the door? Or tip? You didn't learn that yourself, and they're pretty arbitrary generosities in the big picture, it's because someone told you to.
Why do you wish others luck? Why do you wear socks with your shoes? Why tie those shoes with the same bunny ears knot everyone else does? Why do you take a date to dinner? Why get married at all? Why don't you do drugs? Why don't you eat cat meat?
All of these and so much of your existence is following rituals you didn't invent and don't even question - that's one of the most significant values of traditions in all their forms: removing problems others have already solved from your attention. You don't need to reinvent shoe-tying, or what constitutes a good date, or when to eat meals or how many or what is reasonable to eat, or how to maintain your teeth and hygiene, and so on.
Instead, you can just learn how to live by copying the mundane rituals others do and focus your attention on more interesting things. Preserving knowledge doesn't just mean folk stories, it's more fundamental things like taking care of yourself, how to find a partner, and so on that if you stopped to try and build from the ground up yourself (or by reading all the research) you'd just be completely lost and miserable.
Human beings evolved while spreading culture, for far, far longer than we have been writing, longer than we have been homo sapiens even. It is a core part of what we are, so understanding it and accepting it and examining it without bias is important.
I'm not entirely convinced that we can preserve information for generations. We can't even preserve web sites for 2 decades, link rot online is a real problem. That's modern technology with solid state drives and worldwide communication. Language evolution makes this problem even worse. We can't even agree on what the founding fathers of the US meant with some parts of the constitution (granted, there are and have been deliberate efforts on that front but there are legitimate questions stil) and that's with the same government still operating under it while it's people still speak the same language! I don't think information propagation across generations is a solved problem now that we have writing and solid state drives, and beyond that tradition is not going away because it's as much a part of who we are as language and fire.
Nowadays it's just a convenient method to make people do something without questioning it or asking why.