Oh, I definitely don't think that human learning would only rely on RL, or that RL would be the One Grand Theory Explaining Everything About Learning. (Human learning is way too complicated for any such single theory.) I agree that e.g. the Anki card example you mention requires more blocks to explain than RL.

That said, RL would help explain things like why many people's efforts to study via Anki so easily fail, and why it's important to make each card contain as little to recall as possible - the easier it is to recall the contents of a card, the better the effort/reward ratio, and the more likely that you'll remain motivated to continue studying the cards.

You also mention CBT. One of the basic building blocks of CBT is the ABC model, where an Activating Event is interpreted via a subconscious Belief, leading to an emotional Consequence. Where do those subconscious Beliefs come from? The full picture is quite complicated (see appraisal theory, the more theoretical and detailed version of the ABC model), but I would argue that at least some of the beliefs look like they could be produced by something like RL.

As a simple example, someone once tried to rob me at a particular location, after which I started being afraid of taking the path leading through that location. The ABC model would describe this as saying that the Activating event is (the thought of) that location, the Belief is that that location is dangerous, and the Consequence of that belief is fear and a desire to avoid that location... or, almost equivalently, you could describe that as a RL process having once received a negative reward at that particular location, and therefore assigning a negative value to that location since that time.

That said, I did reason that even though it had happened once, I'd just been unlucky on that time and I knew on other grounds that that location was just as safe as any other. So I forced myself to take that path anyway, and eventually the fear vanished. So you're definitely right that we also have brain mechanisms that can sometimes override the judgments produced by the RL process. But I expect that even their behavior is strongly shaped by RL elements... e.g. if I had tried to make myself walk that path several times and failed on each time, I would soon have acquired the additional Belief that trying to overcome that fear is useless, and given up.