I think drilling words will always be more direct than reading but at a higher "cost" (the overhead of building, maintaining and drilling via anki). Ideally, words that are more important will naturally appear more often -- a "natural" anki with little overhead.

But many things are list-like, or maybe just don't stick in your mind via reading, or need to be memorized quickly, or are better memorized in a digital/artificial context, or can only be memorized "naturally" at a high cost (just theorizing here). In this cause Anki is worth the overhead.

If anki were cost free (every interesting thought I heard in a podcast were automatically added to the deck), I'd use it store everything I didn't want to forget.