> So you end up needing more management to smooth over people's quirks.
Is the ratio of managers to underlings different in China? ("tree spread")
As far as teaching phonics, what they find is that different students learn better under different teaching techniques. One-size-fits-all is a mistake. The problem is that it can take a while to find the best approach for a given struggling student. People over-extrapolate their own head into others.
For example, I'm a visual thinker, my relatives are professional artists to it's in my genes. But some are what I'll call "linguistic thinkers" who think in language or symbols. I often have a hard time communicating with such people because their minds just use a very different technique.
And I've also seen resume-oriented-design make messes. Our main architect turned everything into microservices even though were miles from needing "web scale". If you needed to add a new column to a table, one had to visit 7 different files to add it, for example. And if you made a mistake, finding it required sending out a search-and-rescue team. KISS, DRY, and YAGNI were shot bloody dead.
I threw a mini office party the day he left for browner pastures. I brought in 7 layer chip dip that represented the 7 bloated system layers.