Learnandsay has jumbled the terminology of linguistics (which is the study of all branches and aspects of language).
To avoid confusion (I hope): phonetics and phonics are not the same thing.
Both are concerned with the sound of the language. Phonetics is concerned with the actual sounds you make (so is different depending on your accent and how you assimilate speech between words). Phonics is the name of a set of ways of relating the sounds of the language to speech, and is based on the sound of the phonemes of speech (phonemes are the "units" of speech which are meaningful).
The written form of a language is the 'newer' form and is based on the spoken form. You simply cannot write a word is you cannot 'hear' it: which must have come from either really hearing it, or from reading it (which is a way of reporting a spoken word). Even if you've never seen a word before, on reading and remembering it, your brain will store it according to phonic rules (sound of initial phoneme being the important for this).
Irregular spelling exists, and children have to learn all sorts of tricks to deal with the complexities of spelling rules. This is an achievable task for all who are NT with no SpLD, as evidenced by competent spelling in the general population. Movements, often vocal ones, for spell in reform date back a couple of hundred years but have yet to be successful. So although you could write English as regularly as SerboCroat, I doubt this will be happening soon. Particularly as the variant spellings contain so many vestiges of older meanings and that tends to enrich the language.
Phonics is important in learning to spell securely. The regularity of consonants is high, and with these as the "scaffold" of the word, it is easier to fit in the (often trickier) vowels. However, phonic based knowledge of possible combinations that will produce the right sound between those particular vowel clusters is the only possible approach.
Learnandsay's issue seems to come down to whether a child is praised for understanding the relationship between phonics and spelling, producing decodable writing even though it contains errors; or if the child's spelling is corrected.
I know my dyslexic DS benefited from "zero tolerance" corrections of spellings, but I wouldn't hold him up as an example of what will work for most children. But either approach is, at root, phoneme based (and therefore helped by sound phonics)
The teaching of homonyms is covered by classroom phonics.