It'd be super cool if English orthography were allowed to keep up with the times, but we've never been more anal about spelling than we are right now, lol.

Those are the non-English words mixed in.

Individual letters don’t have sounds, but trigrams do.

Given that that's something like half of our lexicon, you're going to have a heck of a time reading if you can't process any of them, but okay, let's look just at words that come from Old English:

food, good

rough, dough

two, to, too

I mean, that was easily read.

If you go read old documents, you'll note they spelled English much more phonetically .

It's a fairly modern thing to use these standardized spellings

English is fairly phonetic. There's a few options for each phoneme and a few common words, but the vast majority follow obvious phonetic structures.

Yes, of course it was easy to read. It was spelled phonetically. That's the point.

Calling English "fairly phonetic" is laughable. In most languages, they don't have spelling bees because they don't understand the concept. How would you not know how to spell the word after someone speaks it?

I'd like to see how much time kids waste learning reading/writing in countries with non-phonetic languages compared to sane languages.

My understanding (mostly from my speech pathologist brother ranting about this) is that we end up with reading/writing tending to lag about two years behind due to it.