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I think you're overstating the effect of this method of instruction, which mostly affected much older people.
It was popular between 1960 and 1980, and waned after that. Whole word and three cueing was never as popular as phonics, and even when used, was mostly used in conjunction with phonics.
This Wikipedia article collects quite a bit of history across multiple countries.
By the 1990's, pretty much every American school system was back to phonics as a foundation. And by 2020, there were pretty much no American schools discouraging phonics instruction and the foundation for teaching reading.
The Wikipedia article that you linked completely disagrees with that you posted:
"According to a survey in 2010, 68% of K–2 teachers in the United States practice balanced literacy; however, only 52% of teachers included phonics in their definition of balanced literacy. In addition, 75% of teachers teach the three-cueing system (i.e., meaning/structure/visual or semantic/syntactic/graphophonic) that has its roots in whole language.[127][128]"
I just read the underlying survey results from the linked source in the footnotes. Which are from a 2020 study, not a 2010 study, but I'll leave it to someone else to fix the Wikipedia page, as my VPN address is blocked from editing Wikipedia.
22% of instructors teach systematic phonics as their method of instruction. 4% use whole language, the system that discourages phonics emphasis. 68% use balanced literacy. And of those, when asked to give their own written definition, more than half (52%) explicitly mention phonics as part of it, literally the plurality answer in what the phrase "balanced literacy" means. 21% mention "phonemic awareness." 14% mention "all five essential components of reading instruction," which comes from a National Reading Panel definition that includes phonics and phonemic awareness as 2 of the 5.
The study report itself explicitly disclaims trying to draw too strong of a conclusion that teachers aren't using phonics just because they didn't use the word in their definition. And other keywords like "whole language" only got 6%.
But we don't need to try to infer what percentage, because the study itself explicitly surveyed the importance of phonics. For the question "When you're teaching students to read, how much emphasis do you place on phonics?," 70% answered "a lot," 28% answered "some," 2% answered "a little," and 0% answered "none."
The study itself pretty strongly supports the idea that almost everyone in the US is teaching phonics as the foundation of reading for 5-7 year olds.
Please check out the investigative reporting by American Public Media, they document schools continuing to use it post-2020 and even some teachers talking about how their school district flat out said they’ll change the program description to comply with the law but not how they teach. If you think this isn’t happening anymore you’re really missing a story.