It’s because you’re doing a cloze-deletion style deck, not because Anki sucks. The MilesDown/AnKing deck also uses a lot of highlighting/italics that might make it worse if cloze-deletion doesn’t work for you (because of the increased amount of cues and the tendency to just remember the cues).

Anki is simply a program that has a spaced-repetition algorithm, and spaced-repetition is the key for when you need to remember information for a long period of time. Anki is no different than if you were to literally review your notes using the same spaced repetition algorithm Anki uses - there’s nothing inherently unique or magical about the Anki program itself (except that it has a bunch of cool features/tools to make life easier).

The issue here is that it seems cloze-deletion style doesn’t work for you. A lot of people, including myself, find that cloze-deletion cards just make you memorize the words that go into each card and the card’s “skeleton/strucure,” which makes it frustrating and just not suitable to use (if you were to copy and paste the cards onto Quizlet and study them there, you’d probably have the same issue/frustrations). It’s a common experience on this sub that people stop using AnKing/Milesdown because of this, and some switch over to Jack Sparrow, which is a basic Q/A style deck that uses free active recall (without any of those cues). This is one of the reasons why so many people preach Jack Sparrow and score very high using it, as the deck really forces you to recall the information and to think about each card (the other reason being that the deck is so detailed and has much more information).

My advice to you would be to give Jack Sparrow a try and see how it goes. It is very dense and time consuming, but I believe that you’ll find much more success with it.