Retraining as a math teacher here, so I spend a lot of time trying to figure out how kids learn stuff at the moment.

At one point in the article it states that indeed the trio of semantic/syntactic/graphophonic cues are used by readers. The article kind of dances around the point that even if these cues tend to be used by competent readers, it doesn't mean that training them directly is how novice readers need to learn.

I'm really coming round to this belief that there is no substitute for the "rote" drilling of basic skills.