I think spelling bees are a thing pretty unique to the English language. In most languages you can infer spelling from pronunciation (and the other way around) with high certainty. Of course, any living language is complicated and has its share of rules and exceptions, but usually only enough to cover in the first couple school years, not enough to make it interesting to run spelling competitions.
When I lived in China, I once participated in a company activity day that included some team games.
One of the games was similar to a spelling bee: the facilitator said a word out loud, and each team had to try to write it correctly on a flipchart.
There are many thousands of Chinese characters. So, even though the folks in my team were smart enough to be FAANG engineers, and were young enough not to have forgotten everything they learned at school+university, there was a lot of head-scratching and second-guessing going on.
