[bobthepanda]

One thing to note is that for non-Chinese languages, Chinese may have semantic meaning but really has nothing to do with pronunciation; and the Chinese etymology really has nothing to do with how a Korean or Vietnamese speaker independently came up with the word so this is less important.

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Another thing to note is that a lot of “Chinese” words in the modern day language are actually Japanese in origin, since Japan was the first country using Chinese script to modernize and adapt Western thought in science and philosophy etc., and the associated terminology. This actually provides a political impetus to replace those words with native-constructed ones since they have a negative historical relation with Japan.

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People who replace Chinese script with letters often have dictionaries and whatnot from the transition period to trace back words, and people also still learn Chinese in these countries if they want to, so it’s not as if it’s gone and disappeared; in the same way that modern speakers probably couldn’t read Chaucer in Middle English, or Beowulf in Old English, as it was written on a whim, but there are plenty of scholars who have studied for it. And Modern Chinese has little to do with Literary/Classical Chinese anyways.

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Mandarin has a phonetic system, Bopomofo, which was abandoned for political reasons in the PRC. But the problem with replacing Chinese script is political; within the PRC and ROC there are multiple mutually unintelligible languages using Chinese script, and if you pick a phonetic script then it is now Mandarin vs. everybody else.