Except all Chinese speakers in the current generation are taught Pinyin in school.

And many speakers write characters (on their computer or devices) using Pinyin, and forget how to write rare characters, see

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_amnesia

* http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=25291 (and the articles linked from it)

Yes and English speakers forget the spelling of rare words, especially if they were to spend extended periods of time using nothing but text-to-speech.

Those that do use Pinyin to write on their computers also know that the large number of homophones makes it an order of magnitude slower than using radical based input methods to directly type the characters such as Canjie, Wubi, Boshiamy etc.