However, we're also introducing a lot of new inconsistencies due to a relatively recent shift to adopting foreign words without changing the spelling or pronunciation as we would have in the past - something no other language does. This forces English readers to learn multiple foreign orthographies and English's to read English.
The British are sometimes better about it. They see the word "jalapeno" or "tortilla" and pronounce it like you'd expect (and get mocked for it) with English's orthography, as opposed to forcing everyone to use Spanish orthography to pronounce them halapenyo and tortiya.
The relevance of accents is greatly overstated. The argument is of the form "we should let the perfect be the enemy of the good, and therefore it's impossible". There are a great many words in English whose pronunciation is irregular: these are the ones we should fix. For these, accent is irrelevant; you can pronounce your r's hard or your a's broad, and it doesn't matter: "bury" is pronounced to rhyme with "merry" in probably every accent of English that's ever been, from Old English (ic byrge vs myrge) on. You could just fix 100 words like "bury" and "could" and "are" whose spellings are either wrong or etymological but don't reflect extant variants, and the spelling would be reformed, children's lives would be improved, and it wouldn't be a problem from any perspective of accent variation or etymology or anything.
If anything, I’m seeing more calls for internet regulation on HN and other tech places than in the past.
Every time something is shared about topics like kids spending too much time on phones or LLMs producing incorrect output, the comments attract a lot of demands for government regulation as the solution. Regulation is viewed as the way to push back on technological and social problems.
The closer regulations come to reality, the less popular they are. Regulation seems most attractive in the abstract, before people have to consider the unintended consequences.
The most common example I can think of is age verification: Every thread about smartphone addiction come with calls for strict age-based regulation all over the place.
Yet the calls for strict age-based internet regulation generally fail to realize that you can’t only do age verifications on kids and you can’t do it anonymously. The only way to do age verification is to verify everyone, and the only way to verify that the age verification matches the user is to remove the possibility of anonymity.
The calls for regulation always imagine it happening to other people and other companies. Few people demanding internet age verification for things like social media seem to realize that it would also apply to sites like HN. Nobody likes the idea of having to prove your identity for an age check to sign up for HN, they just want to imagine Facebook users going through that trouble because they don’t use Facebook and therefore it’s not a problem.