why did computer science settle on base16 for compact binary representation over the doubly compact base32?

Question

For example colours #ff0000, Unicode points \u{003F} and others all use hex.

In: Engineering

Answer 1

It’s primarily to do with making data human readable in a practical way. Hex makes it fairly easy to know the underlying binary states, as it’s easy to work with sums of 1, 2, 4, and 8. Base-32 would just be more complex to understand.
Also, many processors work on 8, 16, 32, or 64 bit values, so 4-bit nibbles divides into those well for the purposes of presentation