“A traditional counting system still in use in many regions of Asia works in this way, and could help to explain the occurrence of numeral systems based on 12 and 60 besides those based on 10, 20 and 5.”

Sounds pretty speculative. Has there been historical research about the age of these “traditional counting systems”?

I’m skeptical that this is the origin of the Sumerian number system.

I feel like I missed out on something big, having never heard about this in my life. As big as if I'd never heard of this unused (for us) Fahrenheit system, except in this case base 12 is objectively superior.

I can count binary on my fingers and get much further than with decimal obviously, but it's not very practical or easy to learn. This makes fantastic sense and sounds almost as easy as decimal, the only difference being that it goes a few digits further.