Just because they were writing in Literary Chinese doesn't mean pronunciation was retained, or retained very well. Consider Mideval Latin and Church Latin "ital

Just because they were writing in Literary Chinese doesn't mean pronunciation was retained, or retained very well. Consider Mideval Latin and Church Latin "italianate" pronunciation. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_Den https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_..., the poem was written by a linguist, so I don't think it it is representative of how most later writers of Literary Chinese thought pronunciation ought to work, but rather a reductio ad absurdum argument again writing in dead languages without using an alphabet.