The simplification suggested in the post has to do with the lack of logic between English spelling and pronunciation. One of the reasons that's at the core of my strategy. Another reason was the tendency of students to pronounce certain words "the Portuguese way". The most obvious example that comes to mind is the personal pronoun "I", which some students tend to pronounce as the Portuguese /i/ sound. Another very common mistake is pronouncing the letter "a" in a word as we pronounce the first letter of the alphabet. Thus, for many Portuguese people "apple" is pronounced as /eipel/ and not as it should be, /aépel/.
In the case of the examples chosen by Oxford Dictionaries, and suggested for informal settings - arguable, given the fact that languages do evolve* -, here are some similarities with the "simplified" pronunciation of my strategy, which is based on Portuguese sounds.
Donut is /dounat/
Thru is /thrú/ (The underlined "th" is for cases such as "thin", "thought"... With words such as "this" and "the" I use the normal "th". This is a sound we don't have in Portuguese, so my students agreed on this code.)
Tho os /thou/
Nite is /nait/
Frend is /frênd/
As I said, I related to the suggestion from Oxford at once, because it's so in sync with my strategy, which was extremely popular with my students and worked wonders for their pronunciation.
* However, I'm not the right person to give an opinion on this since I haven't adopted the new rules of Portuguese spelling. I still write the old way, the way I learned, because there are many inconsistencies that I disagree with resulting from this agreement.