If binary has taught me anything, is that you can count up to 1024 with 10 fingers...

If you've got flexible hands and independent-enough fingers you can even count in ternary, up to 59048 (though binary can also take advantage of toes for a limit of 1048573)

Using your hands to signal 4 in binary could put you in a lot of trouble.

Not a single person I've met has ever used knuckles as a way to count anything, especially time.

You obviously haven’t lived in ancient Babylonia.

(Pro tip: different cultures have done things differently across time and space!)

I have not seen any evidence that ancient Mesopotamians counted phalanges using their thumbs.

I believe that counting method was devised by some fan of duodecimal arithmetic sometime within the past century, and has nothing to do with sexagesimal numeration per se.

It’s visually built into the cuneiform:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylonian_numerals

If that is your evidence then you are tricking yourself, or to be generous speculating wildly.

The evolution here was: physical clay counters; physical clay counters sealed in a clay envelope; physical clay counters sealed in a clay envelope but also pressed into the outside of the envelope to indicate how many; clay tablet with counters pressed into the outside (since the envelopes with counters inside were redundant); clay tablets with little cuneiform symbols to represent quantities, differing by type of object being counted, and not all sexagesimal; more uniform written sexagesimal writing system.

There is no indication in the symbols about how people counted on their fingers.