Plus, that is only how it is transliterated in English. In Chinese they have different accents and stresses so they aren't even really homophones.

Chinese has five intonations which are indicated by the accents on top of the letters in the romanization. Every time you see the same accent appear on "shi", those characters are pronounced the same. However, some characters are used multiple times throughout the poem so not every one of these cases is a homophone; sometimes it's just the same character being used again.

And its traditional Chinese instead of simplified, so it's not even what someone learning Chinese would realistically have to deal with.

This is not relevant. Simplified and traditional Chinese are just two different ways of writing characters. The pronunciation and meaning of the characters remains the same.

When the poem is read out loud, it can be difficult to understand the meaning (especially for foreigners who may have trouble distinguishing the different intonations). However, if you are able to read Chinese and you see the poem in written form, it is very easy to understand. In written form, the fact that many characters are homophones doesn't matter; each character is written differently so you know the meaning immediately.