TL;DR:
I started off reading stuff I’m familiar with in Japanese to help bridge the fact that my skill-level was too low to grasp enough context in completely new things. Now I also just read as much as possible, and I basically add nothing to other SRS platforms as I read, but I do active vocab studies apart from that. FloFlo especially has been such a boon. Incredibly useful.
Two Ace Attorney games were the first native things I fully got through. The fact that I knew the storyline meant that even with my garbage level of grammar knowledge, and less than middling vocab, I could keep pace with the story even when just picking out a few sentences or words at a time.
I am now trying to go for the 多読 approach and have my reading (and listening) be about quantity of exposure, and my specific vocab and grammar studies be about the quality of the exposure.
Sometimes that one word that I don’t know is the topic of conversation, so then I will look it up. And otherwise I only look things up if I get curious about a word.
In the beginning, I would look up most unknown words and take a quick note by hand in kana. Later I’d re-write them more neatly in a notebook to get more exposure to the words and to be writing kanji by hand.
That took a lot of time. Looking things up meant 2 hours spent reading was more like 45 minutes of reading. Sometimes I would also avoid reading - not because I didn’t want to read, but because it was a hassle. But then I also felt like I was doing it “wrong” if I didn’t focus a lot on mastering basically every unknown word.
Nowadays, I binge on as much reading as my time and brainpower allows, and I’ve noticed a much faster improvement in my overall reading ability.
Is this the most optimal stratagem? Maybe not. But it’s also something I can sustain day in and day out, because, unlike my previous strategy, this is fun! I’m enjoying myself a lot! Daily consistency will have me learn more than 2 hours of “perfect” studying every few days, because “perfect” study is too taxing to incorporate in my study routine.