Phonics is an excellent study and method 80% of the time. But you have to teach some sight words. One of my proudest moments as a parent was watching my daughter foul out of a spelling bee at the age of 7 by spelling “light” L-I-T-E. She dealt with a high pressure situation and when confronted by a word she didn’t know, knew that she didn’t know it, but still fell back on exactly the right rule.
That said, she still spelled it L-I-T-E. We broke out the dolch cards dealing with ‘-ght’ words after that and she had mastered the list and included the principle in her revised set of phonics rules.
My two daughters learned to read by sitting on my lap while I read their books to them. One learned phonically from my reading and pointing at the words, the other by whole words. The latter learned a little faster, but the former had less trouble with new words.
No, you don't.
A properly-designed phonics curriculum would have taught your daughter about the phonetic rules governing words like "taught" and "light". English is, despite the conventional wisdom, a perfectly phonetic language.
The phonetic rules, however, are more complex than many other languages.