Struggling with kanji reading and recognition

I’m currently struggling a lot with learning kanji, and I feel a bit stuck.

For the first ~100 kanji, things felt manageable. I can now remember their meanings and how to write them relatively well. But now that I’m learning more, I’m starting to run into two problems.

The first one is readings. People always say “learn kanji through vocabulary, not individually" and I understand the idea in theory, but in practice I don’t really understand how to do that. For example, I know the word しょくじ and if I hear it, I know what it means. But when I see 食事 written without furigana, I can’t read it. I might recognize 食 as “shoku,” but I won’t remember what 事 is in that word, or I will not feel confident that it's "ji". My vocabulary deck on Anki shows the vocabulary in kanji with the option to show the furigana if needed and I always need it. 😫 Even if I happen to know how to read the kanji through elimination, because I know what vocabulary is in my deck, I probably won't recognize it in real life.

The second problem is that kanji are starting to blur together visually. Now many of them start to look really similar to me and I struggle to distinguish the ones I know from the ones I don’t. Sometimes I’ll look at a word in real life and think “I think it's that kanji I studied before...Or is it another one?”. I still can’t confidently recognize it. It's easier when it's in my deck, because I know what's in my deck.

Did anyone else go through this stage? If so, what helped you move past it? How did you personally overcome that?

I'd really appreciate any advice or study methods, thank you in advance!