My mom taught me to read by age four so learning sight words in school didn’t affect me much. My husband was taught sight words and to this day he, an intelligent man, occasionally has to ask me how to pronounce a word. It didn’t hamper his love for reading, but it did for some of his brothers.
Sight and say, whole language is VERY difficult to reverse.
See you tube presentation by Sam Blumenfeld for the history of whole language.