Anecdata: As long as I knew her, my ex had the difficulties described in the article. She blamed how she was taught to read in school -- specifically not having been taught phonics. I figured that was nonsense, and blamed a peculiar-to-her learning disability.
At some point I read Steven Pinker's "The Language Instinct" (which is 20+ years old at this point!), which describes all the research on learning to read... and which pretty conclusively proved to me that my ex was right. For at least some subset of kids, not learning phonics leads to a lifelong reading issues.
That is a useful system for middle readers with limited volcabulary to jump into high school / professional reading, but not so good for very early readers. Note how all the grecoroman stems are defined in terms of germanic words, which are phonetic.
The article is concerned with students who find words like "rabbit" challenging, not with students figuring out "neologism".
At some point I read Steven Pinker's "The Language Instinct" (which is 20+ years old at this point!), which describes all the research on learning to read... and which pretty conclusively proved to me that my ex was right. For at least some subset of kids, not learning phonics leads to a lifelong reading issues.