I haven't yet run into any very early / "hyperlexic" readers who learned by phonics. I'm not a teacher but I'm involved in a coop school and talk to other parents. The other thing worth knowing, I guess, is that very early reading tends to be "autism adjacent".
My observation has been that kids who learn to read very early usually just straight up sight read whole words. Practically every kid who teaches themselves to read seems to do it this way (which makes sense, phonics is a lot of extra steps and not really something a 2yo or 3yo would come up with on their own). I say "teach themselves" but of course they bootstrap by looking at words while being read to, noticing words in their environment, etc.
Phonics and letter-by-letter processing are more reliable methods for teaching kids to read - it allows for more incremental learning and measurement of progress. It's more steady, but it's also slower. The overall cognitive overhead involved seems higher since they need to segment the word, map to sounds / syllables, then play around with the sounds a bit until they recognise the word.
Generally it seemed to me that adults don't have much agency over "how" kids end up reading, if they're wired for early sight reading they will do that with only a few cues, otherwise phonics is the best way but they will tend to read a bit later, which is normal.
They can be wonderful readers and you can ignore the competitive hype from the article.
Sometimes I secretly wonder if phonics in schools is partly a social trick, though? Is it a delaying tactic, a way to make it look like progress is happening, placate anxious parents, keep kids confident, give the system milestones to measure. To help kids engage with words and get them to stare at them until their brain is actually ready to sight read, which develops later and requires more exposure in most kids? (Fluency at segmenting and sounding out new words is a plus but the early sight readers seem to pick that up on their own by some black magic I don't understand).
DISCLAIMER: I am not an educator, I don't do science in this area (and other people do), this is all anecdotal and you shouldn't take it seriously. I should read more papers.