Languages with phonetic writing in the modern day likely achieved that through a language standardization process that included spelling reforms.
English's changes in spelling and grammar are mostly legitimized through influential works of the language, hence why you all gotta learn Shakespeare in highschool, you're being taught the history of how the language we speak today evolved.
There is no centralized academy of English grammar, and official dictionaries in English for the most part add words descriptively to reflect how the lexicon is changing in real time.
Put together this all means that the English language isn't remotely broken, it's just old, older than most modernly written languages by a couple of centuries actually.
Funniest part is if you study immigrant settlements in the Americas from all those countries that underwent standardizations, they're all about as "broken" as English looks too, because they're forms of those languages preserved from before standardization came to their homelands.
Japanese and Italian are especially funny since the standardization came into enforcement recently enough that native speakers from Japan and Italy will be bewildered by speakers from the Americas because the speakers from the Americas speak in a way that sounds like their grandparents or great grandparents if they recognize the dialect at all to begin with.