languagelearning

Simplified Chinese was neither a massive reform nor is it a modern reform. Most of the simplified forms are pre-Qin from before 200BC and predate the Classical Latin Alphabet. The sum total of differences between traditional and simplified is literally only one page long. The current reforms were only accepted because they were based off of shorthand that people were already using. When the government tried to do a 2nd round of artificial simplification people just ignored them. Most people in the mainland still know traditional just from encountering it day to day or in historical documents.

The sort of phoneticization you want to do for English is closer to the reforms applied to the writing systems of minority languages like Yi and Zhuang and the result is that literacy rates for those languages are super low and those who do know how to read and write still use the old logographic orthography.

There's currently a small movement of people who want to bring back traditional chinese in the mainland since the whole premise of it being harder to learn is objectively wrong since everyone already knows it. The only real opposition is just that HK/TW are so annoying that people associate seeing traditional online with liberal/chud opinions.

Also phonetically regular spelling reforms for English do exist and they usually require using a new alphabet and like 100 different edge cases. They usually aren't compatible between American and British English and I doubt the type of nerd who comes up with these things have tried applying it to AAVE or Scots.