A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.
English had multiple attempted spelling reforms, but that mostly resulted in differences between American and British spellings of the same words. There was no central power to enforce a single English spelling because America had successfully broken off from the British Empire whose coercive force backed the English language.
In contrast, France was extremely good at putting down revolutionaries in their colonies. Even when they gained nominal independence France would invent debts to impoverish their former colonies. France was also extremely good at putting down local languages, even within France itself. France waged a century-long campaign to hunt its own minority languages to extinction[0] and the language regulators are themselves part of the same infrastructure.
In other words, "regular spelling" is a colonial atrocity and English's incomprehensible spelling rules are a demonstration of freedom.
This can even be demonstrated in each language's attitude towards loanwords. English stole huge swaths of Latin, Greek, and French vocabulary. Text even a few centuries old is difficult to read and anything older than Shakespeare is completely inscrutable[1] as there's too many Germanic root words for this ostensibly Germanic language. Meanwhile in France, their language regulators fight tirelessly to invent new calques for English loanwords to stop the "Anglicization of French", as if that were a thing that needed to be stopped.
Well, I suppose there is one reason why you'd want to stop it: loanwords make it far harder to regularize spelling. Think about, say, all the Japanese loanwords in English. Hepburn romanization[2] tried to make them readable to English speakers, but didn't do a great job, so now English has to accommodate spellings like karaoke, tsundere, or sakura alongside spellings like pleonasm, beef, or Olympic. Good luck inventing a spelling system that can both faithfully represent the "correct" sounds for all of those words, while also remaining legible to present English readers, and being adopted in every country that speaks English to some degree - off the top of my head that includes America, Canada, the UK, Australia, India, Nigeria, and South Africa.
[0] Which I suspect may have also inspired analogous atrocities in Canada against indigenous Canadians
[1] As I put it to a native Japanese speaker: "You can read Genji, I can't read Beowolf."
[2] Which itself isn't used by native speakers since you can't round-trip Hepburn to Romaji. Japan itself uses Kunrei-shiki romanization, it's the one that spells つ as tu instead of tsu.