To me, I feel that it’s a person-to-person basis for which someone can say whether watching anime with subs is worthless or not. I believe it’s entirely subjective. Each person has their own learning style, attention span, multitasking ability, listening capability, and deductive/inductive reasoning skill set. I can say for myself that I think watching something with subtitles helps me to grasp the idea of speech pace, conversational interaction, and even grammatical structure. It helps me to identify what words come up most often, and usually at what timing they should appear. All in all it helps me to pick up social speech patterns. But this might not be the case for the next person who might be a “one thing at a time” learner (so they MUST watch anime in its raw form; anime sans subtitles). They might not be used to hearing a foreign language to begin with, and that’s always overwhelming (I’ve had previous foreign-language listening skills training when forced to learn Spanish throughout my life, so I already kind of know what to do with what I’m hearing). The main point is that if it works for you, wonderful! It’s an abundant resource that is fun to learn with. If not, that’s ok too! As long as you recognize when it’s time to move forward and not sit in a comfort zone forever, then you’ll do just fine either way.
Just my two cents. ^^”

Ah, so I’m not the only one that has been dreaming about talking in Japanese since starting this program/online textbook! Like OP said, they was basic sentences…but I woke up happy and eager to learn more once it happened hahaha.