I think an issue self learners have is that they are often reading only. Without knowing the kanji you can't actually read anything. With furigana and the phone

I think an issue self learners have is that they are often reading only. Without knowing the kanji you can't actually read anything. With furigana and the phonetic alphabets you can at least read them out loud but I think reading only is why you see people thinking they need to learn a bunch of kanji before doing anything else. I agree with you though, you really benfit from the dense web of association you get from actually reading and hearing words in sentences. Much quicker path to practical fluency in my opinion, and you get the benefit of learning words in contexts you will actually use.