You are 100% right about the old ones dying off and the R&F losing that institutional memory.
But they also count on the training we all got to just go with what they say because they are speaking for god.
Reminds me of this from 1984.
BLACKWHITE: Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this. But it means also the ability to believe that black is white, and more, to know that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary. This demands a continuous alteration of the past, made possible by the system of thought which really embraces all the rest, and which is known in Newspeak as doublethink.
— Orwell, 1984