Is this your experience? If so, I’m glad it worked for you, and I’m interested to know when you noticed this approach worked better.
However, I always do my best to recall meaning, reading and kanji at the same time, and I’m of the opposite opinion: I think it’s harmful to separate them, because in real life, you’re going to need to see a word, pronounce it, and understand it, or hear it and understand it (possibly while visualising it or feeling some sort of visual trigger activating); or you’re going to feel like saying something and you’re going to ask yourself what you know that is close to what you mean. I think studies of speed-readers have even shown that those who claim to understand without mentally saying words end up doing it to some extent, because understanding is almost impossible otherwise. You need all three elements to be linked to each other, at least at the word level. (It may not be as important at the kanji level.) That brings me to my next point:
With all due respect, ‘piggybacking’ is a natural part of human memory. It’s called ‘associative memory’. We all have an easier time remembering things based on something we already know, and it’s one of the most effective ways of memorising something. Memory athletes, for instance, use familiar things like the names and faces of famous people to help them memorise packs of cards at contests. WaniKani relies on this as well: that’s the reason why recurrent characters are used for reading mnemonics, because so many kanji readings are the same. I’ll grant that it’s preferable to be able to remember something without having to spend a ton of time on some other trigger first, but that’s why memorable mnemonics are important.
Perhaps more importantly, trying to completely separate the things one needs to learn can cause other problems. I’ll quote this post, which explains it much better than me:
(I’d say that the full post is worth a glance, at the very least.)
Granted, this doesn’t mean that it’s bad to test yourself separately on meanings and readings, but this seems to suggest that learning them together is more helpful, so testing yourself on meaning and reading pairs also makes sense.
PS: Just as a final thought: when I was learning Chinese as a child, we definitely were taught meanings and readings together. Our vocabulary lists were always structured the same way: characters for a word, readings, meanings, examples. Forgetting one or the other (or both) is perfectly natural, but I can say for sure that we were tested on meanings and readings both separately (through spelling tests/dictation and comprehension questions) and together (through sentence-making spelling tests where we had to write words down and then make a sentence that showed what the word meant). Neither form of review was significantly more effective in my experience, just more or less difficult. What mattered most was how well we had mastered the words beforehand, and that depended on how we had learnt them.