It's a topic-comment language, and I never really thought of topics as modifiers for what follows. (I suppose you could tho)

Keep in mind Japanese drops noun phrases instead of using pronouns. So topics generally aren't repeated even if the grammatical case is not overtly marked

It makes perfect sense. Also, ~80% of Chinese characters are a semantic-hint component + a pronunciation-hint component, which is very helpful for when you encounter Sino-Japanese words with unfamiliar Kanji.

Did people memory hole his first term and the things he said? Did they forget January 6th? I genuinely want to know what people heard, because the plan was always to strip mine the US of resources, sabotage the future of education, and consolidate power into the hands of white kleptocrats.

"coming soon" signs

If you want a book recommendation relating to this question, I suggest "Ideogram: Chinese Characters and the Myth of Disembodied Meaning" by J. M. Unger.

As a practical matter, Chinese characters are much easier to commit to memory with a spoken word to tie them to.

You could argue that words are form + meaning, and you are only interested in visual form and not the acoustic form of the words. But that makes me wonder what the goal is?

I would say that you are not even learning words with this strategy, at least not in the sense of learning words that belong to a spoken language.