I think this is false. Japanese is quite rich for this. It's not worth debating whether Chinese lends itself more to this than Japanese, but as a Chinese speaker (cantonese and mandarin) who speaks Japanese, I find that Japanese is more versatile than Chinese.

Here's why:

1. all the digits have multiple pronunciations.

2. despite your point that many japanese words are monosyllabic, japanese are notorious for shortening their words and maintaining the meaning and also there are the chinese pronunciations ("on reading" vs "kun reading") so there are often monosyllabic ways to pronounce it.

3. additionally, for a given word, there are often tons of different (seemingly sensible) ways to pronounce it. This is confusing to everyone, including japanese nationals. they basically are just really good at figuring out meanings. I often have no idea what the correct pronunciation of written text is, but I know exactly what it means. This is true for japanese nationals as well. here's a great video of a game where japanese people try to guess how to pronounce kanji: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sY63F5wIPzc

Ultimately, the language's ability to be able to be used in the described way depends on the ability to map the pronunciations of digits to other meaningful words. Having a smaller set of sounds leads to more overlap.

Japanese and Chinese both have the property of having single syllable digit names tons of single syllable words in the language to map to. (even though arguably in Japanese "ichi" [1] or "nana" [7] are 2 syllables, "i"" or "na" would be acceptable -- also, in Japanese "shi" and "yon" are both acceptable single syllable ways to say the number 4)

Basically either is ripe for double entendre (not sexual, though possibly that too... for example, in cantonese, you can pretty much say any number to mean penis, though usually with the wrong tone)

(edit: I just wrote a longer detailed explanation of this with examples of neumonics for square roots one comment level above this.)

I have noticed this on occasion, and found it very surprising. They're basically handing control over access to their site to the search engine. That seems like a very bad idea.

if that's where most of your audience spends their time online fighting it might be foolish

Which is kind of the point. Unless people know which URL to type (Disney, New York Times) in other words unless you have an offline brand, you don't have an online brand - you have a relationship with a supplier of customers.