Not really related to the article per se but I always find it interesting how one may become tempted to say "this alternative to a thing I already know
makes so much sense, why don't we always use it?"
I felt the same way when encountering Chinese numbers via Japanese. If 二 is two, 十 is ten, 四 is four, and twenty-four is 二十四, that's so clear! Two tens and four!
I quickly decided that this number system, though something I'd obviously need to learn and become acquainted with if my Japanese learning were ever to progress, wasn't necessarily as easy as I initially imagined. Yes, there are no places, but numbers in this system are grouped at different boundaries — not every thousand but every ten-thousand.
So 六十七億八千三百一万五千四百二十一 breaks up as sixty-seven hundred-thousands eight-thousand-three-hundred-and-one ten-thousands five-thousand-four-hundred and two-tens-and-one — and obviously, that's not quite how we would represent six-(billion/thousand-million) seven-hundred-and-eighty-three-million fifteen-thousand-four-hundred-and-twenty-one, or rather 6,783,015,421.
I post this not to discuss the positives or negatives on the Chinese number system compared to the Arabic one or vice-versa. Rather, just how one's imagination can be so easily captured by the apparent simplicity of an alternative to that with which one is familiar, almost to the point of wanting to adopt it altogether. The realisation of where things get tricky for oneself, often not coming until quite a bit later, sometimes doesn't come until later.
For myself, I tried using roman numerals for my own math for a long time but stopped when I found division too brain-breaking!