Again, yes, it is easier to read. In binary, there are only two tokens you need to recognize. With hex it's 16. With binary, when you see 1101, you only need to recognize two distinct tokens. You can teach a toddler (or maybe even a parrot) to read it in a day, and you'll get to "one-one-zero-one" in no time at all.
Now, understanding what this particular combination of tokens means in the context it appears in, is obviously much harder than if it was given symbolic name, ie. when using assembler. But reading assembly is obviously much harder than machine code (dumped in binary), because you either need to learn the whole alphabet ([a-z0-9] and a few more) the identifiers are formed from, or you'd need to memorize and learn to recognize hundreds of labels. Not something a toddler could do in a day.
Reading and understanding are not the same. You, and some other commenters, want to overload the term "read" to mean everything from first seeing a clump of pixels or a stains of ink on paper up to forming the mental model of the semantic meaning that's solid enough to be transformed in your mind (ie. having an understanding). I'm telling you: it's not that simple.
I'm also trying to tell you that it doesn't matter, because "forming a mental model" is so much harder than just recognizing visual patterns (ie. reading), that the difficulty of the reading part is inconsequential.
There's a pop-sci book titled "Programmer's Brain" - it could be like 3 times shorter if it dropped the irritating long-winded style, but it does explain how interacting with code works from the cognitive science perspective. It's a few bucks well invested if you're actually interested in knowing facts instead of going with your gut feeling.
