First let me start from some personal experience.
I’ve tried learning kanji using WaniKani at several occasions, every time without any significant improvement in my ability to read even simple Japanese. After deciding to abandon it completely, giving Remembering the Kanji a spin, and finally spending a couple of months with KanjiDamage Anki deck while simultaneously reading a ton of graded readers I’ve finally got to a point of being able to visually recognize enough characters to become substantially more comfortable with immersion content.
Recently I’ve decided to give WaniKani another shot, and it made me realize that I don’t see a purpose of using WaniKani, at all. This ultimately leads to the question in the subject. To make an argument why I don’t believe WaniKani to be useful, let’s consider two separate cases.
Is WaniKani useful for a learner who is not immersing in Japanese content and uses WaniKani as a tool to prepare for that?
It is indeed useful to learn some vocabulary in order to prepare for immersion in order to make more content partially comprehensible. However, the order with which you learn vocabulary on WaniKani is not aligned with the frequency distribution, which makes it necessary to go through a lot of levels in order to get a decent coverage. And if you want to get that coverage through WaniKani, you’re essentially forced by the system to cram a ton of random vocabulary that you have to learn mostly through mnemonics.
What’s even worse, while cramming that random vocabulary you’ll probably get extremely annoyed by similar words (anyone else has fond memories raging after getting wrong 上がる / 上げる for umpteenth time?) whose distinction are substantially easier to remember by doing immersion.
After 17 levels of WaniKani I’ve tried Refold’s frequency-based Anki deck, and the good majority of it had new words. (But hey, at least on WaniKani I’ve learned 地中海, which will come in handy. Probably. At some point.)
So no, I don’t believe that WaniKani is a good tool to prepare for immersion.
Is WaniKani useful for someone already doing immersion?
It is indeed useful to do spaced repetition of vocabulary from the content that you’re immersing into. But let’s say you’re struggling to remember something fairly frequent, say, 散歩. Since it’s on level 31, your options are:
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Do WaniKani for a year to finally get the desired word into rotation. In which case no, WaniKani is not a useful tool for you now. It might becoume useful when you’ll finally get to that level 31 in a year.
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Use separate spaced repetition tool for relevant vocabulary. In which case why would you want to use WaniKani? True, you’ll probably learn some useful vocabulary via WaniKani in the meantime, but is the time reviewing all the irrelevant stuff going to be well-spent? Instead, you can do sentence mining to learn only the vocabulary relevant to material that you’re immersing into.
So no, I don’t believe that WaniKani is a good supplement for learning via immersion.
Last point I want to make is about the abundance of third-party browser extensions for WaniKani. I fail to see them as “improvements”. They are rather, workarounds, to make a stiff tool more bearable. And I don’t think that hundreds of mnemonics about Koichi, unvoiced example sentences without furigana, and level-up banners are worth it.
While I don’t think that I will change my opinion, WaniKani seems to be a product that clearly is made with substantial effort, so I will be genuinely interested to see the responses to the question.