Hacker News Reader

Not really. That would represent the currently (starting somewhere in the 16th century IIRC) popular pronunciation norm (which isn't even the only existing nor the only "correct" one) but would discard some significant semantic value. Roughly like replacing g with j wherever g sounds ⟨ʤ⟩ in English.

In Ukrainian language, there is the rule for "write as you hear", which helps a lot to prevent dyslexia, and to keep the language in one piece.

If such extreme rules of pronunciation as in English language will be accepted, then all Cyrillic languages can be merged into one written language.

That letter came to Belarusian Cyrillic script after the Polish Cyrillic project had been well underway. (They had a letter for that sound before that, of course, but it wasn’t Cyrillic)

The author made a conscious choice to use л instead, on the grounds that it would be a better etymological (albeit worse phonetic) correspondence.