I am German so I know and have practiced with quite a few people learning the language, and I've also used Anki when I learned Japanese. I've broadly made the same experience in both cases.

Flashcards or other learning tools don't hurt, but they don't contribute significantly to fluency in a language. When I went to Japan equipped with my vocabulary I learned one thing really quick, I understood nothing in everyday conversation. Learning vocab explicitly maybe turns you into a great scrabble player, but it's an entirely different part of the brain compared to being able to parse and engage in natural conversation. Same thing when people learned German with me, what helped them the most usually was just listening and trying to talk. Vocabulary and grammar comes naturally. In particular in German, sentence structure and order is often quite complicated and a bit arbitrary, you're never going to learn it theoretically.

I actually like Pimsleur quite a bit in particular for beginners because it puts a lot of emphasis on just listening to comprehensible speech. It can get you over this annoying starting point of not having any media available to engage with.