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That annoying character in The Land Before Time is not named Sarah.
Her name is Cera. As in CERATOPS.
English spelling is just fantastic. If you hear a new word, there’s pretty much 0 chance that you can look it up in a dictionary on the first try. Just imagine how “epitome” sounds to someone who isn’t already familiar with it. You’re going to have to go though every vowel before you actually find it.
Also, if you’ve never heard a special word being pronounced, but you’ve read it many times, you are pretty much guaranteed to make a fool of yourself when you finally get to use that word in a social situation. No wonder why spelling bees are a thing in English speaking countries.
English spelling is weird but thats not really a hard word to spell compared to many others. Epitome is either an e or an i, and I would argue a native speaker would lean heavily towards e as a first guess. There is no way that it starts with a, o, or u for example. That's hardly "every vowel". It's at most 2 vowels and most people would have better than even odds if they heard epitome pronounced correctly.
The first time I heard it, was in a BBC documentary about old cars. The pronunciation was nowhere near /ɪˈpɪt.ə.mi/. I think it started with something like /ə/ instead, and that sound corresponds with way too many letters and I haven’t figured out how to make any sense of that.
Fortunately, modern tools will help you find the word you’re looking for, so knowing the correct spelling isn’t that critical any more. However, I was using a paper dictionary at the time, which explains why it took so long.