What seems to be the pattern is that the smarter kids, no matter how they are taught, will work their way through to phonics.
You may have been started with whole word, as I believe I was, but in a few years, you’re seeing the sounds inside the words.
It’s actually an interesting question whether anyone ever learns to read with sight-words. Maybe a few kids with near-photographic memories and willingness to work very hard for many years (compare learning Chinese).
What most kids, the ordinary kids, learn is to be functionally illiterate. We have 50,000,000 of them.
Google “42: Reading Resources” for a lot more.
Actually, I would posit Chinese, Japanese, and the other East Asian ideogram languages as evidence that phonics is unnecessary. In all those languages, symbols and sounds are completely unlinked, as the language has a very limited set of sounds, and inflection and context play a big part in conveying meaning. In other words, it is impossible to “sound out” the components of a given word, such as the chinese word “ma”, which depending on inflection, can mean “mother”, “horse”, “scold” (verb), and several others (each written with a completely different single ideogram). And yet, Asians in general outperform U.S. students in academics in all areas, which would be impossible to do without a strong foundation in comprehending written material. I’m not saying phonics doesn’t have a place in education, but to claim it’s going to fix, or even substantially improve, all the problems kids have with learning to read is naive at best.