Not to denigrate the efforts of folks who study and practice “the act of language acquisition”, I’ve just been surprised and delighted to watch my now 2 year old daughter learn to speak, which has made me think about how different her experience of “learning a language” is from all of my poor attempts at learning foreign languages.
One simply cannot read most Japanese content online without understanding at least a few hundred kanji. It's like if you wanted to learn the English language but had no understanding of the alphabet (ignoring kana for the sake of the analogy). You've got to bootstrap with some rote memorization first, then go start learning new kanji / grammar in context.
Lucky, this doesn't take much time at all, and one can memorize the first few hundred kanji and vocab meanings / readings with a spaced repetition tool.
And in parallel, there are resources one can start with knowing only the kana / furigana, such as these graded readers: https://tadoku.org/japanese/en/free-books-en/
There are textbooks that follow a CI approach, e.g. Eleanor Jorden's. John Defrancis's textbooks are similar but for Chinese. If you look at the reviews the main complaint people have is that they are not learning kanji from the start, despite Jorden explaining exactly why she's not doing that.
Maybe CI is not the best way to learn languages like Chinese and Japanese, but the approach most learners take is definitely not CI.
If I had to guess, most of the recent discussion has started again in the Japanese language learning community, as Japanese is a notoriously difficult language to acquire for anglophones.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG9kpqTRmU&t=681s
Learning Latin with Harry Potter latinus.