One way to disambiguate in Korean, especially North Korea, guess what, is simply using another word to replace the ambiguous one. Why keeping using a word that is causing confusion anyway?
If everyone around you uses Chinese characters, there's little incentive to avoid homophones, so they will remain a part of literary language, reinforcing the use of Chinese characters.
And indeed, Korean words that come from Chinese (about half) have a much higher ratio of homophones than in the native Korean part.