You might find, as you get deeper into the language learning journey, that this approach to practice is most popular among an extremely vocal group of intermediate language learners. But people who've been doing it for a long time tend to gravitate toward the parent poster's opinion.
I've also noticed that assiduously sentence mining your input and then drilling it in Anki is much more popular among people whose media consumption is almost exclusively video content. This resonates with the work of SLA researchers such as Paul Noble who've found that extensive reading is easily the fastest way to grow vocabulary in a new language. There's even some (scant) evidence that SRS combined with extensive reading is less effective than extensive reading alone for long-term vocabulary growth and retention.
It suggests, to me at least, that heavy reliance on SRS for vocabulary retention past the beginner stages of learning a language may not be a universal optimal path, so much as a backup option for people who don't enjoy reading. Like AlchemistCamp I do still like it a lot for specific things, and I'm not here to wag fingers at people who enjoy it (Above all else, make sure you're enjoying your study routine! Getting there should be 100% of the fun.), but I do still worry that many Anki users have a serious case of golden hammer syndrome.
For sure, by no means am I married to the method and am very flexible and open to trying various approaches. I do believe however that a little bit of structure can be helpful in the beginner to intermediate levels, where it's less likely that one has formed a habit/urges to watch/listen to foreign media without subtitles or read untranslated print media. It's a real slog when you don't have a decent arsenal of words to work with.
Perhaps I should define terms. In SLA research, "extensive reading" specifically means reading material where you know at least 98% of the words in the text. At that level you can generally follow the text without a dictionary - including figuring out the meaning of new words and expressions from context - so almost by definition it's not a slog.
It's not just a second language acquisition thing, either. At least in the USA, many educators recommend younger readers do the same thing when reading in their native language, in part to save them having to repeatedly refer to a dictionary.
I've also noticed that assiduously sentence mining your input and then drilling it in Anki is much more popular among people whose media consumption is almost exclusively video content. This resonates with the work of SLA researchers such as Paul Noble who've found that extensive reading is easily the fastest way to grow vocabulary in a new language. There's even some (scant) evidence that SRS combined with extensive reading is less effective than extensive reading alone for long-term vocabulary growth and retention.
It suggests, to me at least, that heavy reliance on SRS for vocabulary retention past the beginner stages of learning a language may not be a universal optimal path, so much as a backup option for people who don't enjoy reading. Like AlchemistCamp I do still like it a lot for specific things, and I'm not here to wag fingers at people who enjoy it (Above all else, make sure you're enjoying your study routine! Getting there should be 100% of the fun.), but I do still worry that many Anki users have a serious case of golden hammer syndrome.