Comment by hiAndrewQuinn

The benefits are obvious to anyone who has used such a program. Consider for example a technique like the cloze deletion: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloze_test

The question side of the card may be directly copied from the textbook, and read something like "An increase in the supply of a complementary good Y typically causes the price of good X to [...]." You can then correctly answer "decrease" or "lower" or "go down". You don't need exact phrasing, because you are grading the card yourself; and actually forming the cloze deletion is in most SRS programs a single keyboard shortcut away. This 10 second loop of copy, cloze delete, create gets you a huge amount of the benefit of learning and remembering the reasoning embedded within the sentence. Imagine trying to create a cloze deletion by hand - you'll be there for 2 minutes just copying the sentence.

The next level up is an image occlusion, where you actually screenshot an entire diagram, math equation, section of code, etc. and then selectively hide parts of it, asking yourself to fill in the blank. https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1374772155

Image occlusions are close to trivial in a program like Anki once you've made a few. But they are, for all intents and purposes, impossible to make flashcards of unless you feel like drawing e.g. an anatomically correct human brain the same way 17 times in a row.