I speak 7 languages (learning an 8th) and can relate to remembering things in context being more effective than rote memorization.

That said, some types of rote memorization do help accelerate learning. In language learning I often come across fundamental words that don’t occur frequently enough for me to internalize automatically but yet occur frequently enough to block comprehension when encountered (it’s little words like “put” or “place”). For these words, I just put them in Anki in sentence context and do a few rounds of spaced repetition to get them in my system.

In my opinion Anki shouldn’t be used for core vocabulary but it’s useful for reinforcing and “cleaning up” words on the fringes that one doesn’t encounter that often but that are very useful.

I also dislike it. As a small child, I remember hating the boredom of needing to learn by rote the times tables at school. That left my appreciation of mathematics scarred for many years. Only when I was approaching my teens I started to like math again, when presented geometry at school. That makes me think, does this traumatic experience with arithmetic tables right at the beginning is what gives math a bad reputation among lots of students, setting them in a course to hate the subject for life? Sometimes I think it would have been better for society to settle in a number system with a smaller base, say 8 or 6, instead of 10, so the tables got a lot smaller (64 or 36 entries, respectively, instead of 100), giving young students a better experience with aritmethics from the outset.