Every other day there's a TikTok of someone claiming they reached fluency in 6 months just by watching anime or never touching a textbook. The comments are full of beginners asking how, and the answer is always some version of just immerse, download this app, trust the process, textbooks are a waste of time.
I tried that for months. Watched shows, listened to podcasts, threw myself into native content from day one. I was completely lost the entire time. You hear something, you have no idea what it is, you move on. Nothing sticks because there's nothing to attach it to.
Japanese has one of the steepest entry points of any language. You can't read a single headline without hundreds of kanji. You can't follow a sentence without understanding how the grammar works. Throwing a beginner into raw native content isn't immersion, it's just confusion.
Going back to structured study was humbling. But that's what made immersion actually start working. Once the foundation was there the listening and reading clicked in a way they never had before.
The people telling you to throw away your textbooks are usually either gifted learners who forgot what it felt like to know nothing, or people who aren't as far along as they think they are and have confused exposure to Japanese with progress in Japanese.
There's no shortcut that actually shortens the path.