It seems odd that they're talking about phonics being a recent thing. At the risk of dating myself I remember a phonics based system being used when I was in primary school in the late 90s, though I couldn't tell you much more since that's a while ago now and I generally spent my time in those lessons reading rather than paying attention anyway. Did it drop out of use in the meantime or something?

It was some New Age NZ woman who destroyed reading education in the Anglosphere despite her anti-phonics method having been disproven in a study at the time.

https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/

The division TheGuardian talks disingenuously about is actually this woo vs evidence based science.

Surprisingly, NSW outsmarted Victoria on this...

In 2015, a report from the New South Wales Department of Education,[4] concluded that Reading Recovery was largely ineffective, and should not be used for most children.[5] As a result, in 2016, Reading Recovery lost its "mandated status" as part of the curriculum in NSW's more than 900 public schools, although individual schools may still opt to use it.[6] A further consequence of this shift in policy is that, in 2017, the NSW Department of Education initiated a hiring program to recruit dozens of new literacy and numeracy experts to support teachers in "evidence-based professional learning", according to NSW Minister for Education, Rob Stokes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reading_Recovery