[yowlingcat]

Yeah I agree. That's not to say that tools like Anki don't have a use -- they do! Use of Anki and memory palace type techniques is really useful for when rote memorization is a /required/ foundation for further progression -- language learning and so on.

But I do agree with you that it takes you there and no further. Moreover, I find the branding of this site (and others of its ilk, these seem to pop up every now and then over the years) to be really disingenuous. I don't think it's on purpose, more out of naievete.

An implicit assumption with these kinds of things is that it's cognitive fitness getting in the way of whatever it is you want to do. That's deeply presumptuous, IMO. The truth is more likely to be as you say -- it's not a lack of "cognitive fitness" -- it's a lack of experience doing the thing you want to do! And so if you want to get better at doing that thing, the difference between success and failure is figuring out a way to practice it consistently and slowly pick more challenging things to do. Not look at it like a leetcode problem with a trick that must be found which magically makes the problem tractable.