My native language is Dutch. For Dutch there are spelling reforms every so many years. English is still using Shakespeare's spelling, I think.
The advantage of spelling reforms is that spelling can stay much closer to how a word is pronounced, and that it's much more standardized. The disadvantage is that older texts become hard to read much sooner. It's amazing how English from the 19th century (like _Three Men In A Boat_) is effortlessly readable, whereas Dutch from before WW2 is noticeably old.
The UK uses a form of written English based on Samuel Johnson's dictionary. The US uses a form of written English based on Webster's dictionary. Both Johnson's and Webster's spelling reforms post-date Shakespeare.
For example, Shakespeare's grave contains the inscription:
GOOD FREND FOR JESUS SAKE FORBEARE,
TO DIGG THE DUST ENCLOASED HEARE:
BLESTE BE Ye [the] MAN Yt [that] SPARES THES STONES,
AND CURST BE HE Yt [that] MOVES MY BONES.
You can see we are not using English spelling from Shakespeare's time.
Is that so? I'm pretty sure everybody pronounces pannenkoek as pannekoek.
Don't get me started on conjugation of loanwords such as "gedeleteted" (I hope I got that one right)
Meanwhile in French... 'taon', 'tant', 'temps', 'tends' all pronunced exactly the same because French loves silent letters.
A way to see how a (more) phonemic orthography would look like in English is to have a look at BBC Pidgin[1], though the increased "phonemicity" isn't the only difference.
But those exceptions you listed are either rare exceptions (h is always silent, but with a handful of exceptions, normally loanwords like hámster or hachís; x is always "ks" except in old/historical words like México or Quixote), or just follow more or less complex rules.
In general if you read and know basic rules, you know how to pronounce 99.9% of the time, if you listen you need to have some deeper level of orthography/etymology/grammar knowledge to write correctly.
Spanish considers 'll' a different letter from 'l' and a couple other examples, but they can do that because they have about attackany sounds as the latin alphabet (I don't remember the exact number, but Spanish doesn't use some letters at all so counting would need some effort)
What we need is if you see a sequence of letters there is exactly one consistent way to pronounce it, and if you hear a new word there is exactly one way to spell it. There are many ways to pull that off.
Also, "fútbol", but also abominations like "güisqui". The frontier between "proper foreign names" and "imported massacred names" is very blurry: You can't import/massacre every foreign name, or else any moderately modern text would read like a clown show.
Why is "güisqui" an abomination, but "whisky" not?
The letter 'w' is not even a standard latin letter but was created much letter to transcribe Anglo-Saxon sounds in English.
No such thing as dialect or regional variation in pronunciation in Spanish then? What about Mexican Spanish?
1. the writing of English was (let's call it) standardized
2. not long after (in historic terms) society decided to majorly shift/change pronunciation of a good part but not all of the language
=> so now part of the language fit's it's spelling, and part is shifted away from it in various degrees
By re-fitting the spelling to match the pronunciation it could be mostly fixed. That just is sadly not really doable.
The obvious reasons to me that English took over the world are because the British Empire forcibly killed other languages (often literally), and then the US's global financial and cultural influence aided it further.
I don't think it's due to English that Britain and the US had such vast linguistic influence, and just as easily if the British spoke a different language, that would be the lingua franca.
In short, there are too many factors in reality to really be able to say "so many people speak english, so obviously it's easy". No, rather, we can observe many people speak english, and perhaps that's because the internet and TV are dominated by english due to tech and hollywood, perhaps it's because the britsh rolled high on the "slavery and racism" stats a long time ago, and perhaps it's because it's easy to learn. My money's not on "easy to learn" being a leading reason there though.
English has some notably easy parts and some notably difficult parts. It's a language with remarkably simple grammar, but the orthography is notorious (see OP) as well as the very large vocabulary makes it difficult to master (although of course a high ceiling in a language isn't too much of a problem if you want your language to spread easily, as long as the floor is low).
All languages of highly developed cultures are equally complex, but English is definitely one that gives new learners a leg up. Its orthography is inconsistent, but we don't read through phonetic transcription. Chinese, OTOH, makes the start as a second language difficult, in all aspects.