Yeah there are a lot of garbage resources out there teaching Japanese 
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Even good ones make this error. If I remember correctly Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar is presenting "AはBだ” as “A is B”.
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For Genki 1 Sarah Moon has created a YouTube series that I found helpful: https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjmFzH5gSNWTi4TwEjWVxv0NEolRmiZ-7
It was the same for me early on but after two months or so, I got much better at learning and remembering grammar. The “readings” tab helped me a lot. Also try to look out for the grammar you learned while watching TV/Anime/YouTube and pay attention to how it is used.
I’m starting to notice that. I didn’t realize initially how quickly one can gain levels. Does it take longer as you progress through higher levels?
Exponentially…
Good to know what to expect. Thanks!
To be clear it only takes quadratically more xp to get to the next level as you gain levels.
Where it starts becoming exponential is when you are getting xp from the same grammar point. It will take exponentially more time to get xp from the same grammar point. This is ignoring the time of actually learning the grammar points and using the SRS.
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Just a random comment, but something I wanted to point out (that I actually pointed out in one of cure dollys videos on youtube). I think the non-human approach is very smart. It eliminates the possibility of an ad-hominem attack on the maker.
These days people are so focused on peoples qualifications rather than what they have to say. So if the maker removes the ‘person’, then people cannot attack the person, and must legitimately listen to the ideas discussed at face value.
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It’s better to look at it as implicit subject derivation rather than some hidden “IT”. What your explanation misses is that the subject derives itself from the topic if it is not explicitly stated. The derived subject from the topic in that sentence would thus be a personal pronoun, not an object pronoun (Not to mention the fact that, in English, using object pronouns when in relation to people is extremely unnatural and rude, a heavy nuance that did not originally exist in the Japanese text and thus, is an improper literal translation.) So the most literal translation would be “As for me, = MacFinch.” which covers the pronoun and post-positional topic particle and then the name and the copula だ. An alternative translation for this that combines both Japanese and English grammar structures is “As for me, I am Macbeth.”
The “As for A” structure is taught in this way to help conceptualize that the topic exists beyond the scope of the subject. When a topic is stated as such in Japanese, it does not have to be restated again and again as subject pronouns like English does which does not have topics in the way that Japanese does, or at least if they do, they are very situational or unnatural and thus nowhere near as versatile. English does not have this kind of topic marker, only subject markers. Thus the translation “I am MacFinch” is considering and prioritizing natural English and taking the derived subject, which is what is stated in the topic, then throwing out the topic as it now only contains redundant information that isn’t necessary to reiterate to keep the English natural.
In essence, the translation of “AはBだ。” to “A is B.” is deriving the subject from the topic and then dropping the topic to keep the English translation natural without losing information or giving it a nuance that didn’t exist in the original Japanese sentence.
This is thrice as long as I was expecting it to be so my takeaway here is that it’s important to understand that some translations exist in the way they do to help conceptualize ideas rather than to be a gold standard for how some sentence structures should be translated, implying that other translations are wrong when in reality they’re serving a different purpose.
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I will give you simple english examples:
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What is your name?
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As for me, IT is John.
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What car do you want to have?
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As for me, IT is Tesla.
What it means? In first example it mean “name”, in second “car”. Same in japanese. You infer the meaning of ゼロが from the contents. Japanese just allows this kind of omissions.
Full sentence could be: 私は名前がマクフィンチュウだ。You can just omit subject since it is obvious from the context. You can omit topic as well.
To be fair, I am going for the brute-force strategy. If I do not remember a grammar point I will have 6 ghost reviews that will make me remember eventually.
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That probably the best way around it.
I plan to read provided resources only if some gramma point will remain"troubled grammar" for more than 2-3 days. It didn’t happened yet. Analysing sample sentences and ghost fighting works fine so far.
But I had some understanding how Japanese works before hand. Harder grammar may make me reconsider this strategy.
You do bring up an important distinction in that the name “John” can be an answer to two very distinct questions.
1:
Q: Who are you?
A: I am John. (The person who is you - personal pronoun.)
2:
Q: What is your name?
A: My name is John. (The object that is your name - object pronoun.)
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My point is you don’t have sentences without subject by definition.
For example: “Harry Potter and Philosophers Stone” is not a proper sentence (for some strange reason you call it nominal sentence in English which is confusing).
So each Japanese sentence has to have a subject. Subject in Japanese is almost always mark by が with very few idiomatic exceptions.
So in structure "AはBだ” there has to be が somewhere. And it is because full structure is (XはAがBだ） “As for X, A is B”. You can use zero pronoun an A part of the sentence which you don’t say at loud. It best translation is “it/they”.
In japanese in both cases you can answer: 私は(ゼロが)ジョンだ.
In first case ゼロが will mean 私 and it is omitted because is too obvious from the contexts, in second it would mean 名前 and it is omitted because it is useless repetition.
The core difference is that japanese don’t like to put people as main actors of their sentences. They could say 私がジョンだ but that would be too egocentric.
It is better seen with different sentence:
私はこの本が分かる。
We would translated it as “I understand this book”, but it is not what that sentence really mean. Main actor of the sentence, its subject, is 本. So it is not me that understand this book. It is books doing that it presents itself to me as something understandable.
European language tend to be egocentric. We like something that is a person, or at least a living being, as subject. Japanese is more fatalistic, or rather animalistic. They don’t like main actors to be them. Its rude 
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Nominal sentences are proper and full English sentences. You can use them when answering questions and omit the subject.
Q: What is your favorite book?
A: Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.
What’s missing from your explanations that’s important is that when the subject is not omitted or has a generic pronoun as its placeholder in English, it must include a possessive pronoun in these instances. You can’t say “Favorite book is Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.” You have to include “My” and make the sentence “My favorite book is Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.” This is what I mean when I say the subject derives from the topic in Japanese. You don’t a put “私の” in the subject because it derives this information from the topic.
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To be clear, I do think the way you’ve conceptualized these concepts is fine, I’m just looking at these from the viewpoint of someone trying to become a professional translator where having a solid grasp on both English and Japanese is important.
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check out the meaning behind “nominal” 
that’s why I said it is confusing name. It is sentence in name only, so it is not really a sentence, but you still call it sentence…
In given example you just omitted the start of the sentence. “It is” + plus nominal sentence. I will not argue if it is legal omission or slang. In Japanese those kind of omissions a perfectly legal and you will find a lot of them in official documents and even law.
This is actually a problem I had when learning discrete mathematics. The definitions for the terms used in those were so specific that I had trouble finding their true meanings in standard dictionaries. The nominal here doesn’t mean a sentence in name only, but a name/noun only sentence - a noun phrase in more simple terms. It’s a type of sentence that’s valid only under certain circumstances, for instance when answering a question.
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trust me. this is just unclear nomenclature. I did study a little bit of linguistic in Polish and we have two separated words for those terms. There is key difference and it is just confusing to use word “sentence” when speaking about nominal sentences.
Edit:
I just realise something strange. In Poland they teach us about linguistic from elementary school. I remember learning this stuff in fourth or third grade. They even teach us what particle is even if there is only one (“li”) in our language and it is not in use for last 200 years or so. I guess they did for completeness sake. I guess they teach that stuff because we need to be able to understand english lesson and Polish is quite complicated. I always thought it was a total waste of time but some general understanding of “universal grammar” actually become useful to me 
I guess if a student want to complain about curriculum it is wise to wait 15 years to know if it really was waste of time