My initial reaction as well: "What a way to draw out something simple across page of prose."

(1) Numbers in Chinese match well with the tonality of the language making it easier to remember (compare: "singing" numbers in any language works better to remember them).

(2) Chinese students are trained from a young age to memorize.

That's it basically. No "obsession". No hidden stuff. I also find articles like this pretty degrading.

That doesn't mean I'm not jealous of my Chinese half of the family to be able to remember numbers so easily whereas I can barely remember my PIN code :).