I’m going to be one of those people so take my thoughts with a grain of salt because I have not tested yet. But I have friends who have also done that strategy as well and have been very successful. Here is the truth of the matter. You can find every single success story if you search long and hard enough.

The person who studied for 1 month and got a 520. The person who only used blueprint exams and got a 518. The person who swears that Princeton books are the best etc.

Something that has been proven over and over again is that passive learning is significantly worse than active learning. But how do you measure someone using Anki correctly? I’d wager that more than half of the people get extremely frustrated with Anki and it’s user interface and don’t set it up correctly and just give up on it. They aren’t unsuspending cards and working on the correlates Uganda sections, they aren’t doing reviews every single day. How do you know someone is actually reviewing incorrect answers on Uganda vs just answering them super fast and saying they completed x amount of questions per day?

So yes you may have done well, great or even fantastic by passively reading books for weeks on end. But that does not mean that person would have not done better if they had just done the active learning techniques and done them well.

TLDR; People skip to reading books because it’s within their comfort zone and are overwhelmed with the active learning techniques.