For anyone hoping to learn a language I think this step is the key. Probably worth the same as doing everything else on the list put together. 2 hours a week will probably get you from A1 to B1 in 3-6 months
(Italki are 1 on 1 language classes)
I've been learning German 2 hours a week + homework for 2 years and I'm not yet B1 in German. We are 4 students with one teacher and, from what I understand, we are not particularly slow.
Maybe German is really harder to learn than other languages, but probably not 2x or 4x as French (I'm French).
English shares a significant amounts of structure and words with French, so French ends up being relatively straightforward to learn for a motivated English speaker - the only real difference is the amount of tenses, which OP unsurprisingly still struggles with. I bet you, as a French speaker, would grasp Italian very quickly - much faster than most Chinese likely ever will.
German ended up sharing much less with Romance languages, so it stands to reason that it would take 2x-3x the effort of going from English to French.
2 hours a week to B1 in German as an English speak seems totally impossible. I was probably B1 in 6 months at the level of study I described. I studied 5 years of Latin prior to starting so the case system wasn't an additional learning curve. Your pace honestly seems standard.
French has plenty of difficulty in orthography and some in grammar. Maybe the grammar is slightly less complex than German, but only slightly. But I'd say for someone from another language that is easily overshadowed by prior experience in English or Spanish or similar.
There are many linguists who think it's more important to get comprehensible input, then produce comprehensible output [0]
Surely yes you need to adjust to the sound of a foreign language, but with no feedback loop of trying to speak and having another person feedback, how do you adjust?
Listening to hours of completely foreign language won't make you understand what the words are or what they mean, so "comprehensible" input includes weasel words that require you to already know the language before you can learn it. It's all over a bit weird.
Don't people say some of the most effective ways to learn are the immersion courses where you go to a retreat and speak only that language for weeks at a time, studying and learning 8 hrs+/day and then there are people who spend years reading or listening but aren't confident to speak anything. But are there people who spend years speaking with fluent speakers who still report they don't know the language?
[1] inb4 "hurr think you know better than professional linguists"
I do wish the class was twice a week for more forced cadence of practice but that's an adult problem.