Well, whichever "read" or "lead" we're talking about, I'm certain they are pronounced differently by, say, Kiwis, than, say, New Yorkers -- each of us still has to have two prononciations, yeah, but we mostly make do.
In the case of "read" and "lead" we just learn this by rote early on, shrug our shoulders, and try not to think too much about it. English has a lot of this, but really, not that much, and at the end of the day it's a pretty accessible language (as demonstrated by the many who speak it as a second or third language).
Other languages are more accessible than English. E.g., Spanish. But every language has complexity buried somewhere in it. Spanish has several regular forms of verb irregularities, and also a bunch of irregularly-irregular verbs to boot, with over 4k irregular verbs altogether -- and I'm saying Spanish is more accessible than English, but maybe I'm wrong.
French is rather complex, IMO. Like all Romance languages it has a ton of verb conjugations including a ton of subjunctive moods. It has as much phonetic complexity as English, and a ton of orthography rules ("all words that start with af... have a double-f except for Afrique, and some dozen other words I don't remember").
Japanese has Kanji, counters (over a thousand of those), tons of homophones, four writing systems...
Chinese languages have Chinese ideographs. Say no more.
Hangul is simple enough, I guess, since it is phonetic, but there must be complexity somewhere in Korean -- perhaps someone will tell us about it, but it's a fair guess on my part that Korean has complexity in it.
Russian is famously difficult to learn.
Etc..
