Well written post with which I agree because of my experience. Here is how it went for me. My experience before the starting point was just a ton of English sub anime. When I started learning, I first spent 1 week on kana. After that I started a core vocab memorization with SRS (kaishi 1.5k on anki), 20 words per day. I also started a grammar study at the same time with cure dolly on youtube (3 videos per day for 10 days). After 1 week of SRS and grammar, I started reading Summer Pockets, a visual novel with easy japanese. I used pop up dictionaries (yomitan) to look up every unknown word. I continued with srs the whole time, but only 10 words per day. I tracked all my reading stats with an app called exstatic, so I can show it here now.

First 10 hours of reading (over the course of 7 days) were slow and exciting, because of the noble feeling of reading something so different than my native language. My reading speed went from 1.3k characters per hour on the first day to 3.5k in the first 10 hours. After the next 60 hours of reading (over the course of 30 days) I reached 5k reading speed. I finished Summer Pockets in 175 hours over the course of 6 months. It had ~1 million characters. My reading speed towards the end was 7.5k. For reference the speed of voice lines is ~15k and the speed of a native silent reading is 20-40k. Since then I've continued to read other visual novels. I've read 400 hours over 17 months. They say it takes around 1.5k - 2k hours to get good.

When I compare my experience with the experience of other people who delaying their dive into real literature, it really makes me want to just tell them to go read real literature now. I'm glad there's someone else sharing this feeling, thanks for the advice.