- The comment is referring to a graph that used 10^6 on the vertical axis, which is a very common way to format graphs with large numbers (not just "lately"). It's also the default for a lot of plotting libraries.
- 10^n is more compact than million/billion/etc, more consistent, easier to translate, and doesn't suffer from regional differences (e.g. "one billion" is a different number in Britain than in the US).
I'm not saying it's clearly better than "million" in this specific case, but it's definitely not clearly worse.
- 10^n is more compact than million/billion/etc, more consistent, easier to translate, and doesn't suffer from regional differences (e.g. "one billion" is a different number in Britain than in the US).
I'm not saying it's clearly better than "million" in this specific case, but it's definitely not clearly worse.