I'm coming to wonder if tools like Anki are even detrimental for most learning tasks. Because SRS is built around rote memorizing a bunch of isolated factoids, while the most important part of mastering most subjects is not memorizing facts, it's learning interactions and patterns that let you make use of those facts.

Like, imagine if someone learning to program put a huge amount of their effort into using flashcards to memorize the functions in their preferred language's standard library. I think most people would agree that this person is wasting their time because IDE tooling and Internet searches make it really easy to look up that information on an as-needed basis. So the real effort should be put into learning skills like domain modeling or how to read and debug code.

I think that the same principle might apply to most subjects. Even in language learning, one of the places where SRS is most popular. Academics seem to be pretty skeptical of using any sort of flashcarding to learn vocabulary. In part because the empirical evidence doesn't actually seem to support it, and in part on theoretical grounds. The contemporary model for how the brain models language is fundamentally connectionist. Definitions and lemmas aren't something we naturally memorize as a list of facts and then plug into a grammar, which is why native speakers often have difficulty reciting conjugation tables or defining words.

I think that formal education's tendency toward representing subjects as lists of factoids is fundamentally another manifestation of the McNamara Fallacy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy). As long as educators have a mandate to (ostensibly) objectively quantify students' progress with grades and scores, they will have a need to represent the subject manner in a manner that permits easy quantification. And they will have to do so regardless of whether it actually makes sense to do so for whatever subject they're teaching.