Chinese Seems to have a Lot of Homophones - Would Long Scientific or Literary Texts Written in Pinyin be Fully Comprehensible or would this Lead to Problems?

I'm not learning Chinese, I'm just curious about this after discovering how tones originally emerged in the language (losing word final consonants) but there are so many homophones for a given syllable (tone included!) I understand that measure words, context etc. would large assist with distinguishing words especially in speech, but what about written texts where the phonemic quality isn't so important for communicating meaning?

Some essays against Pinyin/in praise of characters suggest that many texts would become incomprehensible - and as I understand it the "shi poem" (施氏食獅史) (I do realize its not a single syllable but a few distinct ones) doesn't make sense when spoken out loud - and thus in Pinyin. But is this accurate?

http://blog.tutorming.com/mandarin-chinese-learning-tips/what-are-chinese-homophones According to this, there are 40 characters/distinct words for a given tone of "yi" - would those really all be reliably distinguished in a Pinyin text?

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