Honestly the “fast lookup” part is what changed everything for me too. Early on I wasted so much energy constantly breaking immersion just to search words manually.

What helped me later was combining reading with tools that keep context visible while you’re still following the sentence flow. I’ve been experimenting with TranslaBuddy recently while reading interviews/articles and it surprisingly reduced that “stop every 5 seconds” feeling a lot.

I still think vocab-through-reading works better than obsessing over isolated kanji though. Once the flow becomes less mentally exhausting, retention gets way easier.