埋め合わせる (to compensate for) - meaning explanation

Please recategorise if I’m in the wrong place. Sometimes we get weird words like these where it’s not immediately obvious how the kanji (in this case 埋 - bury, and 合 - suit/join) add up to the meaning of the vocab, in this case 埋め合わせる - to compensate for.

After a bit of digging it makes more sense to me now since 埋 can mean filling up or plugging a hole, and here I guess 埋め合わせる means to compensate for in the sense of “to match (and fill up) a deficit” or something along those lines.

The reason for my post though is that Wanikani opts for a more straightforward explanation:
“If you bury somebody in order to unify them with you, you’re almost certainly trying to compensate for something.”

Sure it’s catchier, but it definitely doesn’t make any sense as to where that vocab is coming from. And for me I just think an opportunity is being missed here. Surely it’s better in the long term to understand what a word means rather than just another goofy story? What do people think? It’s kind of related to this thread where we break down longer vocab words, which most people agreed helped them remember the readings, but Wanikani rarely acknowledges it in the lessons.

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Quite. In fact, WaniKani frequently confuses homonyms, especially when it’s trying to force things to fit into a mnemonic. Not terribly conducive to accurate understanding…

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I don’t want to bite the hand that feeds me… the crabigator has been kind to me over the years and I realise it’s hard to get the balance right between making explanations memorable and making them informative, but I think we (the users) are often underestimated when it comes to our desire to really understand the words and where they come from. Please give us the good stuff!

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I’m not sure it’s catchier. Mnemonics help when you’re a beginner, but when you get to a certain level of language comprehension, it’s more memorable to explain things using concepts from the same language.

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