I had the same concerns when I first learned of it, and you are right. It would be difficult to use it for excessive amount of information, if you did want to learn entire paragraphs verbatim. I'd argue it could be used for verbatim learning but we don't generally need to. It's usually enough just to remember the concept.

All paragraphs are made up of about 8 different parts of speech, nouns, adjectives, pronouns, prepositions etc. For learning the core of a text, you can usually get away with learning just the nouns and verbs, and you can fill in the blanks when you come to put it down on paper or voice it. (It would be tiresome to memories words like "to" "for" "the" "I")

Personally, I work with a lot of legislation and am examined every few months. I use the technique to help me remember the concepts and different points. Difficult to explain without an example, but I basically build a rule in one room - put all of the criteria of that rule into that room, and then will move onto the next room for the next rule in the logic chain. My most recent exam was on Residency Tax for example, and there were different rules for different countries and different rules for different amount of days spent in certain countries. I essentially have a house full of calendars, birthday parties, countries flags in my head, as well as the necessary outrageous stuff to help me remember them.

It's worth a go if you do get time, I feel like it has naturally improved my memory even without doing the steps. I seem to have more attention to detail, and picture things without realising.