So the question is, why do we tokenise it in such a way that it makes everything harder?
The tokenisation needs to be general -- it needs to be able to encode any possible input. It should also be at least moderately efficient across the distribution of inputs that it will tend to see. Existing tokenisation schemes explicitly target this.
There is no encoding that makes everything easier. You trade off maths for general intelligence. Now we are at a point where the LLM can just choose to use a normal calculator anyway!