I don't think they're saying the relativistic effects don't exist, just that they're still largely unimportant compared to Newtonian effects.
For precession of perihelion of Mercury we mostly noticed because any error is cumulative over time and we could integrate over an arbitrarily wide timebase. The relativistic effects are <10^-8 of the total, around 1/10th of the change imparted by Newtonian gravity of planets much, much further away. The BepiColombo orbiter should allow us to correct for the relativistic effects of other planets' pull on Mercury, but it's expected to be a change of <10^-12.
So I guess "many, many decimal places" is in the ballpark of 6-12.