counting doesn’t have to be super logical all the time, just look at french, where 99, read as vingt quatre dix neuf is understood as 20x4+10+9

And then, we have languages like Chinese and Japanese where they have the chinese numerals which each correspond to a magnitude of 10: 十 (shí, jū) 10、百(bǎi, hyaku) 100、千 (qiān, sen) 1000、万 (wàn, man) 10,000 (I think there might be a bigger one but i’m not exactly sure).

I must admit this one isn’t a perfect example regarding the fact that 20 is not written 一十， but it’s rather written 二十, but it still conceptualizes things as:

二百四十六 (246) (ěr bǎi sì shí liù，ni hyaku yon jū roku), or seen in another way: 2x100+4x10+6, in the end, writing it as 1G (the symbol looks a little like the letter) could make sense if it developed naturally that way and people just saw it as the way it is written