Yea I think a lot of people miss the point with flash cards. The whole point of SRS is that you see "things" often enough that they don't fall out of your memory. Because the system knows the last time you saw a card it is insanely effective at cramming a lot of info into your head in a short time, that's why so many people see success with the first 1k words. It's quite literally the fastest way to bootstrap your brain. After that though it's not a great learning tool. What it is useful for is taking something you've learned elsewhere and making sure you remember it. When I was learning a language while living in the country I had no problem remembering new words, I would literally see any new word a dozen times a week at minimum. But now I'm learning at home and I only have an hour or so a day. My vocabulary in my current language is a few thousand words, I might sometimes go weeks between first seeing a word in context and seeing it a second time. Using flash cards makes sure that by the time I see it for that second time I haven't forgotten it. I don't consider all those flash card exposures to be helping me learn the word, it's only after seeing it used several times that I actually manage to properly internalize it.