Maybe? I'm not as familiar with reading pedagogy for other languages. However there are generally 5 components[1] and one is vocabulary which is how you distinguish Lead and Lead and Led.
You're right, English is kind of wacky, but this exists in other languages as well. For example there's significant Gaulish influence in French[2] and the written and spoken language offer a number of surprises for learners.
There's an amusing way to score how consistent the language orthography is: train an LLM on it, then measure the error rates for words it wasn't trained on. English is very bad on that metric: https://aclanthology.org/2021.sigtyp-1.1/
"Phonics" the term is mostly something that comes up in American context because there is a controversy on how to teach reading and writing English to begin with. In many other countries, the equivalent of phonics is simply the standard methodology that has been in use for so long that most people can't think of anything else, so it doesn't need a special term to describe it.
You're right, English is kind of wacky, but this exists in other languages as well. For example there's significant Gaulish influence in French[2] and the written and spoken language offer a number of surprises for learners.
[1]https://www.lexialearning.com/blog/a-full-breakdown-of-the-s...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_French_words_of_Gaulis...