I've experimented with a wealth of homemade and premade decks.

A lot of vocabulary decks based on textbooks used in class, e.g.:

    人 -> person

But I find that for more complex words, I reconize them in Anki, but not in texts.

I also did a large premade deck of example sentences from a grammar book, which I actually found to be very helpful for general language understanding.

I've also failed trying to complete Heisig's Remembering the Kanji, using Anki.

What worked best for me was putting in sentences rather than single words.

So I might put in: ハンバーガーを食べる

Then there's two good ways to practice this. One is just reading/recognition. Can you understand the sentence?

The other way is to make it into a card to practise output: ハンバーガーを_____ (eat)

The part in brackets is a hint to help you get the correct word. Your hints at the start will often be direct translations of words, but you can also use images, emoji, dictionary definitions in the L2. Anything is ok, or combinations.

I often make my output cards very easy:

ハンバーガーをた____ (eat)

While it may look too easy, I still have to remember the word I'm studying.

In general words taken from real books, TV shows, youtube videos tend to stick in my mind a lot better than words from textbooks, wordlists and grammar books. Those tools have their place but they're not the be all and end all.

Good luck! And remember it's a long road. I've made 6000 flashcards over 10 years to learn a second language and I'm still far from "done".

Have you tried using Wanikani? I have been using it for less than half a year and I already know more than 600 Kanji, most of which I can recognise in written text also. Of course, it helps if you reinforce the material through some other means, too, e.g. by working through a textbook.

disclaimer: not affiliated, and WK is not a perfect product (they have some weird quirks), but I've found it to be rather effective. You can also the first three levels for free.