Maybe the only way to be good at reading for basic proficiency is to just reading more? Not sure why there are so many theories and practices. I have two anecdotes. Not that they count, but in case other people had similar experiences: One is that I didn't know how to read when I entered my first grade. For the entire first grade, I read only my textbook, which was too simple to help me read other books. And then in the summer time after my first grade, I picked up a book for fairy tales of animals, and I read along. I didn't look up a dictionary, I skipped the words that I didn't understand. And miraculously reading was never a problem for me any more. I repeated the pattern when I started to learn English. In English it was a graded reading by National Geographic, if I recall correctly, and later popular fictions by Sidney Sheldon. And then Japanese and then Spanish. I repeated the same pattern. In Japanese I started with 多読, and for Spanish La Alchimista, and Si Hubiera un Mañana after some graded readers. The reading just naturally became easier over time.

Another anecdote was that even the most struggled students in my classes, throughout my middle school and high school, had no problem reading popular fictions. And by struggle I mean they would fail pretty much every subject and could barely graduate high school. However, there were a few extremely popular novels when I grew up, and everyone talked about them. So, every student read them. The novels were written in pretty elegant language with lots of sophisticated words, yet my classmates had no problem understanding them.