It seems to me we have gone pretty far down the path of optimizing in this direction, and from my perspective what we’re losing in the process is actually pretty profound.

Access to online content is of course totally different from two decades ago, but these changes also change the meaning of language acquisition. I mainly wanted to point out that tech discourse often directly equates accessibility and convenience with progress, when they are in fact tradeoffs

All good points! There is definitely value associated with greater accessibility, which should also be considered. I agree newer tools can be more useful for certain elements of learning Japanese, although I am skeptical thats true about internalizing the writing of kanji.

Good to see there’s some pushback to such folly