> I could see FROM being first, that would actually make a little more sense to me.

Personally, I disagree. In English, an imperative statement like "move that chair from the dining room to the living room" is generally verb-first (with respect to location, anyway). SQL's flow has always made perfect sense to me.

A pretty common request is to lift the FROM up before the select, like the below. I'm pretty fine with status quo since my mind is usually "hmm what do I need to get" first, then I figure out how to get it, but some engines (duckdb, I think?) support both so everyone gets their cake.

What people often want: <where to get data from> <what I want from it> <how it's filtered> <how it's grouped> <how it's filtered post group>