I’m curious about this. Are you saying that by, say, second or third grade, you didn’t know that “ball” started with a b- or buh- sound?
If you did, then you were reading phonetically.
If you didn’t and went on to memorize a large vocabulary of sight-words that you didn’t sound out, you have a very fine memory. A rare memory.
Trouble is, most kids don’t. What are we to do with them?
All the phonics experts say they teach 99+% of kids to read in first grade.
That’s right, I didn’t think of it as sounds. One day in the car, at age 4, I read a word on a billboard. I brought a book to my mother and asked her to teach me to read. The first word was “look”. She said the word, I read the word. I was off and running.