You’re probably not very good at playing the piano. I’m not sure what you mean by far enough, but not being able to sight read a piece is not the same as being unable to read sheet music at all.
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.
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.
