I think the problem comes down to: there is no good way to retain the information. And writers don't think about it either.

Most writers will say you need to "practice" and "apply" whatever you read while being very vague on the how. I'm interested in a habit creation system for methodologically allowing you to get good at applying say a mental model, but aside from that I think the best alternative is incremental reading/spaced repetition. (https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Incremental_reading)

tl;dr: while it can't give you procedural/neurally honed representations of the models you would get from practice, it gets close by allowing you to memorize declarative info.

I've found it at least partially functional for being able to sort of apply mental models, though there is still a large gap between knowing and applying.