Yep. If you hear Chaucer read aloud by someone who knows the phonetics and the meaning it's instantly like 75% comprehensible. If they give you a bit (like, half a class-period) more help, you'll get to ~90% without any more effort than that. Chaucer is more or less as incomprehensible as Glaswegian - that is to say, it's a bit tricky, and you won't know all the slang, but you can get used to it pretty quickly.

What's really fun is that if you keep the dialect in your head, and try reading it out loud with your best "Chaucer accent" it feels like slipping on a pair of glasses: you immediately "get" stuff that you'd have thought was impenetrable just looking at the page.

Source: my medieval lit classes, with a teacher who was really good.

Since spelling was not standardized at the time, I suppose there would be no real loss of meaning if someone were to rewrite these works using modern/standard English spelling? Why are high schoolers forced to read these archaic texts as written? It was just so tiring to try to read them; I could never get through any of them and resorted to Cliffs Notes.

I wonder what modern English would look like if the battle of Hastings went differently