Honestly? I think you’re right in broad sweep. It’s all about massive input. I think that if you just did SRS learning words only for two years vs watching TV, listening to radio for two years at the end of the two years the TV/radio would win out. The anki person would know a lot of words but only barely be able to understand easy stuff (if he/she had used mp3s in anki).
Where anki/srs shines is in speeding up the initial process. We don’t learn big chunks of grammar at the beginning. 100% it is isolated words.
Therefore my armchair philosophy on this is brute forcing a bunch of very useful words at the beginning THEN once you have at least 1,000-2,000 brute forcing a ton of listening/watching TV is optimal.
Lingq is very interesting because it’s not really purely reading. I bet most people would fail if they just tried to learn by reading. Lingq is exposure to the sound when you click on each word. That in my mind is critical.
Anyhow, different strokes for different folks. Watching youtube videos of discussions from various of the polyglots is very interesting. They all have different methods.