TBH though, the vast majority of misspellings one sees aren't especially hard words. They're "loose" used instead of "lose" and things like that.
Never had any interest in spelling bees but I've done a huge amount of copyediting/editing so I'm very aware of mistakes (including misspellings) in writing generally.
Over the past two years, "payed" in place of "paid" has become very widespread and I have no idea why. It seems to have started on social media and has been rapidly spreading upwards.
There's always been pressure to regularize irregular portions of the english language. Although, personally I've seen learnt coming into vogue even though I certainly learned it as a regular form.
As a sibling pointed out, what the spellcheck accepts is law, and those dictionaries have grown signifigantly.
> Over the past two years, "payed" in place of "paid" has become very widespread and I have no idea why
It's been common forever, because “payed” follows the most common pattern of forming a past participle in English (“ad ‘-ed’”) and also fits the pronunciation people are familiar with from oral communication; it's been infecting more formal communication since automated spellchecking displaced much second-eye proofreading because it is actually a correct spelling of that verb form for certain—though less commonly encountered—meanings of “pay” (yes, the verb had different conjugations with the same pronunciation and different spelling for it's different meanings because English is just that way.)
Another old one in that vein is hanged/hung with hanged pretty much specific to executing people. (Although, partly because "hanged" just doesn't come up in daily speech much any longer, hung almost certainly gets used more frequently and isn't considered especially incorrect.)
Never had any interest in spelling bees but I've done a huge amount of copyediting/editing so I'm very aware of mistakes (including misspellings) in writing generally.