I find it a bit suspect that the article claims this comes directly from the devs but provides no quotes or links to a statement, but hopefully it’s true, and the article is just bad. Seems to be an annoying trend in journalism these days to not link to sources.

It gets better, but learning vocabulary at that level is going to feel very slow no matter what. I would recommend keeping a fairly low bar for just ignoring words and moving on, as keeping up the reading habit is by far the most useful. If reading feels tedious it’s easy to lose interest.

One to two new words per page sounds high enough where you are bound to get repetition, so you may want to only look up words that seem either important for context or familiar (i.e. feels like something you’ve seen before) to get the most value. I combine that with spaced repetition (Anki) for words that I seem to look up often, but Anki has a bit of a learning curve so it may or may not suite you.

This comes to mind: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bark_bread