I read music pretty well, but sometimes I think my guitar instructor thinks I’m an idiot, because I read music strangely.
He’ll say ‘Start from the E’ and it will take me 5 or 10 seconds to find the right note from which to start. When I read music I don’t read notes as their names, I read them as tones. I suppose the best analogy I can come up with is that when you read this, you don’t read each letter and think A‑D-A‑M adam I‑S is D‑U-M‑B dumb. You just read it as: Adam is dumb. I’ve always read music this way, but I used to be better at picking up the notes on the staff, but since I had an 8 year break from reading music, that semi-ability is slow to come back.
In the other direction, sort of, I can’t play things by ear unless I’ve read and memorized the ‘passage’ first. I’ve got a good memory for rote things.