Vocabulary matters enormously. But a list of translations is not the thing you are ultimately trying to learn.
A word in real language arrives with pronunciation, grammar, neighbouring words, register, collocations and expectations about what can come next.
Words need relationships
If you memorise an isolated translation, you have learned a useful clue. A sentence teaches considerably more: where the word sits, what it combines with and what the whole pattern means.
Repeated examples gradually turn those relationships into expectations rather than rules you have to reconstruct consciously.
Context does not mean abandoning deliberate vocabulary study
There is a false choice between flashcards and immersion. Early learners benefit from deliberately learning important words precisely because those words make subsequent input more comprehensible.
The better solution is to connect the systems. Learn the word, meet it in a sentence, hear the sentence, encounter it again in a story and eventually see it repeatedly in natural material.
The unit of fluency is larger than the word
Fluent comprehension depends heavily on familiar combinations and patterns. The faster these are recognised as wholes, the less processing is required word by word.
Vocabulary is essential raw material. Context is what turns it into language.