OK, so "tough" is undeniably proounced "tuff", the "-ough" suffix here being "uff".
What should we infer from this? To one way of thinking, the "-ough" suffix is "uff"... well, mostly... and this says nothing about (say) "gh" as a prefix, which has its own rules. But to another, clearly "gh" can sometimes be pronounced "f"; and, since we have "tough" and "bough", by extension we can assume nothing from (say) "ghost".
Either way, whatever you think of "ghoti", "bough" vs "tough" is (in my view) enough to demonstrate that the current state of affairs is what you might well spell "er kluctureghoucc".
It's not supposed to be believable - quite the opposite. The entire point is that it's an artifical example to demonstrate irregularities.
Was there such a point? The person who invented this spelling was 21 years old, if I'm reading the article correctly. Who knows, maybe the entire point of inventing it was to impress opposite sex.
...and then other people tried to use this word to advocate language reforms, of course. All I want to say is that this word doesn't make me feel there's need to change spelling rules. Other examples, like dough-through-enough are more moving.
Maybe this is why I am so angry with this article. They could have picked less artificial example to demonstrate irregularities.