As a native Chinese speaker, I know that many older and less educated people in China do write with errors or using some non-canonical simplified characters, bu

As a native Chinese speaker, I know that many older and less educated people in China do write with errors or using some non-canonical simplified characters, but usually it's not a problem for us. In most cases, the meaning of the word with the character missing or corrupted can be deduced from the context. For example, it's common to see people in mainland China that cannot write 餐 (can1, meal) correctly, but I never experienced any issue with that in real life. In addition, I read and write simplified Chinese natively, but I can read traditional Chinese with little difficulty, and even a little bit of Japanese with high kanji density. The characters have evolved significantly, but the remaining similarity is still enough for me to parse the text.