But then they have that annoying rule about saying a "zero" when there is a 0 for a magnitude between non-zero digits, for example 108 is one-hundred-zero-eight.
Yeah that is weird. Because usually a "十" would mark the ten-count anyway, so saying a single digit could only be the ones-count, but they interpret it then differently to mean 80, even if you do not say "十". To me this is not logical and is unintuitive.