Sure, Korean is phonetic, and so learning it phonetically makes sense, since you won't be forced to re-learn it again to be able to use your knowledge. Speaking from experience studying Korean, though, attaining a useable vocabulary through rote memorization is dramatically harder than if you're familiar with the 한자/漢字 words are derived from, for exactly that reason - even though hanja's not used directly so much in korean, we started studying it in the third semester of Korean class, and it was helpful, though I'd agree maybe a bit excessive there.

Games that use a strict hiragana character set are readable by natives because they're already fluent in speaking; they're unnecessarily difficult for non-native speakers, particularly since they tend to only have the bare minimum of separators between words. After living in 4 prefectures, working for a small Japanese company, and dating a native speaker for roughly a decade, I still find those games hard to read - it's just hard to identify the shapes of words, like reading English with no spaces; you have no choice but to guess where the boundaries are and sound everything out syllable by syllable, because everything's written differently from how you'd see it anywhere else.

If some people want to put off kanji or memorize phrases from a travel guide, that's their prerogative, but not teaching the compositional aspects of kanji, and leaving students to fend for themselves after selling the idea that it's all rote memorization (and seemingly to push this implausible ethnocentric dream of the language one day being exclusively romanized) is just a disservice to the students, as it was to me.