If you graduated before they implemented this or aren’t American, the system they started to use to teach kids how to read is called three cuing. They teach kids to identify unknown words by guessing based on clues in pictures with the sentences, what word would ‘make sense’, and whether the answer they came up with looks right based on the first letter.
As you may have noticed, none of that is reading a word. These are strategies that borderline illiterate people will use to try to understand words, and for decades it’s been the method used by many schools across the country.
So that person you’re arguing with online who keeps going off on bizarre rants barely related to anything you said might not be a troll, they might just be functionally illiterate due to having never been taught to read. Yaaay!
And yet, the people who chose to make that change were taught to sound aloud, so really it’s anyones game as to whichever outcome’s better :P
Three cuing, or at least something like it which I cannot be bothered to check the term for is a valid reading technique, the difference being that it requires a certain degree of reading skill beforehand.
Certainly, you’ve learned a few words off the page, or television purely through context, and that’s essentially ‘three cuing’. Issue is, it’s not an effective introduction to literacy, as it skips the foundational skills to reading. It was introduced based off studies of adult literacy, I believe.