Thank God it didn’t happen.
Not only did it propel literacy rates to basically 100%, but it added a phonetic component to the language
> it added a phonetic component to the language
Fanqie has been a thing since the 2nd century. Zhuyin was invented in 1913.
Not sure what you mean by this. Do you mean that it's less convenient for people that don't speak / read Chinese? Why would that be a relevant metric?
You may be missing that character standards have changed over time and that different writing styles (草书，行书) are implicitly simplifications. You can think of latin or Russian cursive as a simplification of the printed letters.
In practice, the phonetic component has been mangled / evolved over time, so simplification doesn't make things more or less difficult for students (be it 5 year old native speakers or 50 year old non native speakers).
Both massive wins
The problem also can also happen when translating from English, if you think about all the surnames that are occupations, or names like "bill" or "lily." Capitalization usually helps disambiguate, but there's title case and all caps and people who never capitalize anything...
The cases where simplification has removed those cues are rare enough that the extra complexity of traditional characters is really not worth it.
I've never heard anyone claim that simplified characters are more difficult to learn, and it just seems false to me.
Because of these difficulties, there is a long tradition of anglicising names of settlements to meaningless collections of letters which when read by an English speaker approximate vaguely to the original Gaelic name. Unfortunately this is not a reversible process - you can't look at a modern anglicised name and guess what the Gaelic is, in general.
Now while Gaelic has a tiny population of native speakers, there are millions of people who know some "map Gaelic" - that is, we can look at a map with Gaelic place names, and understand the elements. It doesn't work for towns and villages, but generally in the north, no-one bothered to anglicise the names of natural features, just the settlements - and walking is the most popular outdoor recreation in the UK, so we learn this when we read maps.
When the first SNP government of Scotland came in, they introduced bi-lingual road signs, even in areas where Gaelic is no longer spoken. There was and is complaint over this, but I found that things became much clearer. I could look at a placename like Machrihanish, and see that it is Machaire Shanais. I still don't know what Shanais means, but Machaire is a type of landscape that I know, so I immediately know that this is low-lying and grassy, and fairly level. I can do this for thousands of place names without being able to reliably tell how to pronounce the words - similar to the way that the pronounciation of a word indicated by a Chinese character can vary widely with the part of China, so that the pronounciation becomes quite secondary to communication.
And simplification's only "arguable merit" is that it saves a fortune in ink at the expense of losing its historical roots. But guess what? We mostly use computers now. So great job Mao, now we have two competing standards. (Nod to XKCD).
Unrelated but to those of us who started with 繁體字, simplified just looks ugly. (龙 vs 龍)
And about losing the historical roots, I guess if you're interested in it, the characters will always be there and accessible for you to study. I'd be interested how much the average Joe from Taiwan really remembers about random characters' roots, composition and meaning. I know much more people from the mainland, and among them are people who don't give shit, and those who can also write a lot of traditional characters and give lectures about the origin of meaning of some character and whatnot.
Also, since this is about computers after all, I've seen a study a while ago about from mainland where they tested how many mistakes people make writing less common characters. There was a bar chart that went down between 10 and 20ish, then went up a bit and started to go down again at around 30. It was speculated that people in school still have to write a lot by hand, and during/after college that stops and everything has been digital for a decade now so people just forget again, but folks old enough to have used pen and paper for a couple decades just had enough practice. I wonder if this effect would be more or less pronounced with traditional characters.
For example 竜 is a fairly common simplification of 龍 and imo not nearly as ugly
I prefer simplified for the aesthetics alone. Traditional is cringe and ugly in typed form.
An alphabet can be adapted to basically any language. You just have to map the letters to the sounds, and you're pretty much done.
By contrast, the Chinese writing system is adapted very specifically to the properties of Chinese language. Every syllable in Chinese has a meaning (or set of meanings), so every character represents one meaning (or a few). English does not have that structure: words can have very arbitrary syllables that don't have any meaning on their own. Chinese characters encode a meaning plus a sound, which is often reflected in how they're composed (i.e., a character will often be composed of two simpler characters, one of which has the correct meaning and one of which has the correct sound). Chinese words do not change form: there's no conjugation, no plural form, etc. As a consequence, the writing system has no way to deal with things like conjugation.
I have no idea how one would even begin trying to adapt Chinese characters to write English. On the other hand, it's relatively easy to come up with a way to write Chinese in any alphabet.
But yeah, the whole notion is kinda silly. Most writing systems in the world are developed from very few originals. E.g. for most of Eurasia, the source is either Egyptian hieroglyphs or the Shang Oracle bone script.