I know nothing of these subjects so I ask: is there any advantage to the typography and scrip system that is simplified Chinese vs a small alphabet a la Latin or Cyrillic?
First, it makes the etymology of the script is very apparent. Often etymology in for example English is very obscure, and requires great leaps of imagination and inference to make the connections. Compare that to the character 灣 referred to in the piece, which means "bay" and contains the "water radical." The etymology can be made more clear in this way.
Second, the script is agnostic to how the characters are pronounced. This is what has allowed it to be used for several languages in China (often inaccurately referred to as "dialects")—which are often pronounced completely differently—for hundreds of years.
That said, there are clearly many, many disadvantages, and the main thing preventing change may simply be inertia.
And pride. I've noticed the Chinese are quick to defend their writing system, despite its lack of "efficiency". Which is understandable: it is a thing of great beauty, with thousands of years of cultural heritage.
At the same time, English is a required subject in Chinese, and hopefully as that improves, people here will get the pros (and cons) of both systems.
There is a lot infighting since the Communist in the 50s/60s decided to create simplified Chinese. Traditionalists would argue that simplified Chinese writing is not as elegant/pretty as traditional (I agree, although I have a bias as I grew up in a country that kept traditional Chinese) but the dominance of China has forced almost every other place in the world that writes in Chinese to use simplified. This includes Japan, which I believe a large majority of their signs are written in simplified version of kanji.
And this spills over into the U.S. where the Chinese who have lived here (which would consist mostly of Hong Kong and Taiwanese) are now fighting (or have fought) the recently immigrated Chinese from China over which system to use in U.S. schools.
So there is a lot of pride, but maybe not in the way you believe.
Japanese simplification has some overlap with Chinese, but overall they are not the same, and the simplification was definitely not "forced" on Japan by China.
I am saying the superpower it has since become has "forced" most other countries to defer to using simplified rather than traditional.
But I think computer/smartphone semi-phonetic input kind of gets you the best of both worlds.
Especially in these 4 character groupings, you can find a lot of efficiency and elegance. It expresses ideas & meaning that would take 20-100 words to fully express.
That greatly speeds up reading, but also makes it hard to discover typos, in particular characters inside of words that have no as-/descenders.
In this way, alphabetic writing is maybe more accessible - novice readers can decipher character by character and map to phonemes, thus having a way to understand all words; experts pattern match and read faster.
The word 灣 wān (= bay, cove) might be related to 彎 wān (= curve, bend) but the character doesn't tell us that; it's certainly not related to 水 shuǐ (= water) which appears in 灣 as 氵.
灣 wān also provides an excellent example of where the "character etymology" definitely isn't the actual origin of the word. 臺灣 Táiwān (= Taiwan) is made of characters meaning "terrace" and "cove", so you might think aha, Taiwan has a purely Chinese etymology from "Terrace Cove", but in fact it's unrelated: it's from Siraya (an indigenous Taiwanese language) Tay-uan (= sea people).
There are some advantages to Chinese typography over a phoenetic system. Phoenetically written languages like English go from symbols to sounds to meaning. Chinese goes directly from symbols to meaning. Eschewing the sound stage means that as sounds evolve over time, the symbols, whose meanings change on a much slower time scale, are still comprehensible for a long period of time. This means, among other things, that Chinese formal writing is mostly common to all dialects, whereas a pronounciation-based system could only serve a single dialect. For example, in Hong Kong, where Cantonese is the de facto spoken dialect of choice, I, as a Mandarin-only speaker, can still understand all the signage even though I cannot interact with a Cantonese-only speaker. 1000+ year-old texts are reasonably accessible to well-educated high school students.
One would have to test the comprehension and reading scores of kids from alphabetic and ideographic backgrounds, at the same ages, to see if that argument held any weight.
I would be interested to know if the effort taken in memorising thousands of symbols has a beneficial effect on brain physiology. It's obviously much more computationally taxing than an alphabetic system: would this lead to better overall working memory ability, or would that be offset by the extra energy it takes to process?
[1] the use in this case means the region in question has its own military.