Yep. I agree with measured criticisms of Anki even while feeling the app is really useful if you use it well. Whereas Duolingo isn't worth bothering with at all. It's purely optimized to maximize engagement/revenue.
This also applies to practicing every single day: I find it easy to do a few Duolingo "lessons" as warm-up before delving into more in-depth practice.
Nowadays I would not use it for real "practice" at all. I use it to check my understanding for 5-15 minutes a day. If I make mistakes in Duolingo (eg. forming the plural, remembering the dative for a given grammatical gender) then I look these things up and study them.
I might drop Duolingo completely at some point, but for now I'm getting a non-zero amount of value out of it—I am increasingly looking into better options, though. I'm already looking Anki, and I'm sure there are some other language learning apps out there.
With nothing but duolingo and occasion "let's try to read or watch movie", my ability to read or understand went high in a way that would not happened without it at all.
I have been following many of the recommendations on https://learnjapanese.moe/resources/. Most of them are language-specific, but perhaps you can still draw some inspiration from the methods and look for equivalent tools in your target language.
https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-duolingo-reignited-us...
Shows when incentives are aligned to shareholders vs users, that is the outcome you get