Agreed, even when my loss was profound (and unaided) in one ear and severe-profound in the other I still okay, as long it wasn't tooo noisy around me. But even then I didn't have a really hard time, heck you could still lean in and talk to my ear and I didn't have to lip read. I even took college courses with no interperters, note takers, or anything like that and I aced everything, even biology and the professor was African and had the worst accent you ever heard. I don't think anyone understood half of what he said really. He wrote a lot down lol. It's wasn't until my "good" ear, the severe-profound dipped down into profound that I really really started to struggle and started having to rely mostly on a combination of lipreading and listening, I could even talk on the phone without streamers or whatever when I was severe-profound. I needed a lot of repeats so I was probably annoying, but I could do it.
