Ah, I think I see where I misunderstood!
I thought by this, you were arguing for WK teaching both readings and meanings, but TESTING for kanji meanings only (so, posting in agreement with OP).
Sorry!
Honestly, I think there’s an argument for both approaches? Yours is what RTK favors, which obviously has worked for many people. And pm215’s approach (learning vocab readings as needed without explicitly studying kanji readings) also works.
I’ve personally benefited heavily from learning readings alongside kanji, but a huge part of that is because of the semantic-phonetic composition userscript. Thanks to that script, WK basically gave me a crash course in semantic-phonetic composition. Is this necessary to explicitly study? No, not at all. You’ll pick up a lot of this on your own with exposure. But I found it really interesting and helpful, personally.