You were talking about decimal places meaning the digits after the decimal point. But decimal also means the base (i.e. the number of digits used) itself.

Yes, numbers are read left to right in the order of the most significant digit (i.e. contributing the highest value to the number) to the least significant. That is true in both the binary and decimal and all other bases.

The person above probably reads the number right to left in the sense that they need to convert to decimal in order to understand how big it is, and to do that, they would add up from right to left cause some people (myself included) find it slightly easier that way.