It's anchored on the left. ${name#subdir/} will turn 'subdir/abc' into 'abc', but will not touch foo/subdir/bar. I don't think bash even has syntax to replace in the middle of an expansion, I always pull out sed for that.
Thanks for clarifying, I learned something new today!
Edit: It turns out that Bash does substitutions in the middle of strings using the ${string/substring/replacement} and ${string//substring/replacement} syntax, for more details see https://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/string-manipulation.html