It sounds like you prioritized maxing your GPA per unit of effort instead of engaging with the material in the way that's most beneficial to you.
Why on earth would you ever write an essay that's just meaningless jargon to you? What on earth were you expecting to learn?
The same thing happens in STEM courses. Three examples:
1. Projects. If your project incorporates the professor's research priorities/interests you can get away with way less work, but will also get less out of the course.
2. Programming assignments in CS. Professors rarely assign open problems; they're almost always assigning variants of important solved problems. Students will often look up the paper or wiki article where the original solution was described and then copy the algorithm and/or proof. This often results in high marks for low levels of effort.
3. There's an even better analogy in Mathematics, where students sometimes learn how to parrot the structure/rhetoric in proofs instead of actually learning the mathematics. Professors often don't do a careful enough job grading and give these proofs high marks because they sound correct and are mostly correct. However, it's clear from a second glance that the student has no idea wtf they're saying.
Students prioritizing low-effort parroting instead of seriously engaging with the material is pervasive in CS and Mathematics.
Some of that blame lies with the professor, and when students never learn that parroting/memorization is bad, I guess that's a huge failure of the entire education system (K-12 through higher ed). But IMO students who know that's the game they are playing (e.g., writing jargon-laden essays instead of writing in a way that is true to their own voice) don't have a lot of room to then complain that all they learned was how to play the "max GPA for min effort" game...