It's been said before in a lot of different ways, but being able to draw things accurately from memory is not the pinnacle of being a good artist. It's a cool trick, like remembering the first 50 decimals of Pi, but that doesn't necessarily make you a good mathematician either.

Needing reference is not a weakness or flaw and says absolutely nothing about your skill as an artist. You don't stop needing them because even when some things come naturally to you through experience, there will still always be gaps in your knowledge, or you'll need a reminder.

References don't "hinder your creativity" either. Creative thought is really just our brains combing through and combining existing knowledge and visuals to come up with new things. The size of our pool of cool ideas only grows with the knowledge and visuals we have to tap into.

What makes good art, I think, is first the scope of one's creative thought by having absorbed a wide range of knowledge and existing visuals, resulting in genuinely interesting and well informed ideas, and then the appliction of skill and reference to convey those ideas clearly.