Your article is confused between code walking (recognition of forms) and evaluation order. Code is generally walked top down for the purposes of expansion of macros, compilation or interpretation. Evaluation of nested expressions is generally bottom-up, and in well-behaved Lisp dialects, left-to-right.

You cannot simply let your eyes randomly land on some (a b c) in Lisp code and assume that a is a function being called with arguments b c. You have to read the whole sentences and phrases, so to speak.

No language is immune to this. Can you assume that * X is a pointer dereference? No, it could be a declarator. Or a fragment of a multiplicative expression. Or the interior of a comment as in /* X.

(a, b) could be a comma expression, or the argument list of a function call.

I can't think of any language in which I can extract any substring of a sentence that could be a syntactic unit on its own, and correctly understand its meaning without knowing the rest of the sentence.

Lisp has to be scanned from the outside in: we have a defun, which encloses a let, and so on. When you're familiar with the piece of code you're working on, you can then take considerable shortcuts. You know you're in the middle of a function, even though the defun is off the screen. You know you're in the middle of the progn-like body of some construct (a loop, or let or whatever), so all the lines of code you see are evaluated forms.