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I've noticed that across my many hobbies, there are always people who insist that THEIR way of learning how to do a thing is the ONLY way to learn how to do a thing. This seems more prevalent in the music world, though. Especially if they had strict teacher.

Wes Montgomery couldn't read music, but he was a pretty good guitarist [1]

[1] This is an understatement, by the way.

> You’re probably not very good at playing the piano.

This is rude. What the heck do you base this on?

Yeah it's a moronic comment. I'm not even going to bother to compile a list of musicians that smoke everyone else without reading sheet music, but you can't throw a rock without hitting one.

In the professional music scene, you can go for an entire career without running into one. It is a relatively small set of outliers, and even then, there is a narrow set of genres (most of them Western and modern) where a professional player can get away with not reading or writing music.

Even in the poster child of learning by ear, Jazz, something like 99% of session and pro players learn to read music.