Maybe it's because I haven't managed to configure it correctly but I was always a bit underwhelmed by the way it works by default. If you try to learn a language you can do a bunch of cards for vocabulary (my main use case) and it'll keep flashing the words and ask you if you got it right. You never have to input the words yourself, it's always foreign -> native or native -> foreign etc... I really missed not having to actually write the translation myself, I find that it helps massively when you're learning the spelling of the words.

Eventually I dropped Anki for the (closed source and freemium) memrise and I've been using ever since, I currently have a one year streak going. When learning vocab it actually asks you to write it down, or pick the correct translation from multiple choices which makes it a little less repetitive and more stimulating. It also has a few professionally made decks for some languages which are pretty decent in my experience. In the end it works a lot better for me.

But again maybe it's anki's defaults that aren't for me, but if that's the case they're pretty mediocre defaults IMO.