Wait, is there a difference between “bug” and “insect”?
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In colloquial usage, no, they are used pretty much interchangeably.
In scientific usage, “bug” refers to the Hemiptera order of insects, which include cicadas, aphids, grashoppers and shield bugs - what they have in common is the shape of their mouthparts.
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In Japanese it seems to be the case that every 昆虫 is a 虫 but not the other way around.
See e.g. this hinative answer.
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I’m not sure on when exactly WaniKani has talked about this (From what I remember, it’s at the time you learn the Kanji 者), but they mentioned the fact that because the meaning of 者 is “someone”, then it would be attached to other words to describe a person who does such activities.
For example, you could look at the word 医者:
医 - medicine.
者 - someone.
So… we have someone who does medicine, I think that we can actually call this one “doctor”, don’t we?
Another example that is more similar in the context to 王者 is 勝者:
勝 - victory, win
者 - someone
So, if we have someone who’s victorious, we can just call him a “winner” or “victor”, right?
So why not just to use 王 instead of 王者? well, I don’t really know. Japanese can be weird. Although I think that this “weird” that I was just talking about isn’t necessarily “weird”, but just the lack of understanding of the Japanese language that we have.
The more Japanese you’ll hear and read, the better context these words will make.
I hope that made sense, and sorry for any grammar mistakes, as I’m not a native English speaker.
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In the sense that a spider and a worm can both be called a 虫, but they are not 昆虫. Same in English, you can colloquially call them bugs, but they are not insects.
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… and sometimes dragons, which is how we got 虹.
Having a word that covers a wide variety of creepy-crawly things is common across a lot of languages; linguists sometimes call this category “wugs”, a portmanteau of “worms” and “bugs”.
I made an album a wide back trying to track some of the ways that 虫 has ended up in various kanji.
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Is this a link? I can’t access it 
Excellent! I hope they take your suggestion!
I’ve found it can be translated as “champion”. I think it fits well for this title and agrees with what you’re saying. A champion “rules” everybody else, but it’s not a literal king.
Uhm… I can’t find that info here, was it in the lesson? I can’t remember… But I understood your explanation, very clear! Thanks.
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I’d advise reading the post, not just the title 
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It seems I forgot the “https://”; it should be working now
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English is not my first tongue and I always thought that insect and bug were synonyms, so I thought that spiders could not be bugs since they are arachnids (and not insects) and worms also could not be bugs since they are not arthropods.
To now discover that bug actually doesn’t mean insect is quite surprising to say the least.
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It works now! Really interesting album!
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What? Why would I do that? There’s words in there.
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Words? In a post? That describe the point being made?
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If Wanikani were to add the vocab 昆虫, that would need to be done at level 19, right? Since that’s the level where they teach 昆. Is there a way for them to add this word at level 4, right after teaching 虫?
Not realistically, because that would require moving 昆 down to 4, because you can’t teach a compound word without having both kanji learned. You wouldn’t really want to do that, because you learn a compound item 昆布 at 19, having learned both those kanji that level. You’d also have to move the radical ‘compare’ down from 8 to 4.
So while it’s theoretically possible, it’s extremely unlikely and wouldn’t really be a good idea.
There are times where they do that kind of thing. Like teaching Mt. Fuji twice, once after you just know mountain and again when you know all the kanji. But it feels a bit more awkward to do it with a normal compound.
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This reminds me of how you often see not-yet-learned compounds in example sentences using half hiragana and half known-kanji. If the compound sentences had a natural-method-esque progression, that would be very useful technique, but that would be overwhelming and unnecessary for WK.
Pretty sure it only happens twice on WaniKani - ふじ山, as you mentioned, and 朝ごはん, which appears again as 朝ご飯 after you learn 飯.