Did we collectively forget that most written languages directly encode the sounds of the spoken language?

Your brain tokenizes sounds into words. A beginner reader has to parse text into sounds and then into the token. An advanced reader can skip the middle step and parse text into tokens. But you still have to know how to parse text into sounds, there's no way around it.

It'd be like giving someone a French texbook, only instruct them in English, don't even mention the different sounds, and somehow expect them to learn conversational spoken French. It's nonsense.