> The other article has examples like "how do I get the subset of an array in JS". In my experience if I encounter this type of question it either means that I end up having to hack a JS program but it's a one-off I don't intend to actually learn the language (in which case I don't really need to bother to learn the language) or I'm actually learning the language but then I will probably encounter this situation enough times that I'll have it memorized soon enough.

> Either you really encounter this word often in your work and you'll have learned it soon enough, or you see it once every other year and then is it really that big of a deal to have a quick google to refresh your memory if you've forgotten what it means?

You've identified a key problem with today's (admittedly justified) cult-like worship of spaced repetition systems: most people don't take the natural spacing they'll encounter into account.

A while back, I tried learning languages by curating and dumping 1000s of sentences with relatively common words into Anki. It was more effective than paper flashcards, but I realized that I was wasting a lot of time and boring myself by continuing to keep words I'd encounter while reading native material in my SRS. I eventually reached the conclusion that it makes the most sense to fill the SRS only with the long tail of words where the natural spacing you'd encounter isn't sufficient to create the natural SRS effect (i.e. words less frequent than, say, the 10,000th or 15,000th most common word).