Changed formatting is a shock the first time. But it does not take long to retrain yourself to find it aesthetically more pleasing.
When you're making a quick fix to a batch job that does not hit the problematic query for 30 minutes, the cost of messing up the comma is 30 minutes. (Yeah, I know, it all should be properly factored out, and unit tested. But there is a lot of lightly tested code in the real world that behaves just like I said.) Because SQL is stored as plain text, there is real value in making your mental compiler have to do no work to notice stupid syntactical stuff.
Couldn't you use an IDE that understands SQL? IntelliJ does this - it recognises the SQL dialect you're using and can even validate against the tables & columns in your schema
Discussing IDEs is a different religious war. Outside of the Java world, people are not so wedded to IDEs.
Going back to my last job that was mostly SQL, I was working in Perl, with SQL embedded in TT templates. Good luck finding an IDE that understands that.
In that job the comma placement was critical. Which column would be the last column would depend on what options the report was being generated with. The point is that people would ask for many variations on the same report. One person would want a top level view, another would want to break out event type, another would want to break it out by which type of advertising campaign was thrown at it - and all were being generated out of the same templated SQL so I didn't have to maintain code in parallel. But the result is that in the code I couldn't make assumptions about which column was going to wind up being last.
Thanks to leading comma formatting, it was sufficient to require that the FIRST field stayed the same. Which proved to never be a problem.
There are a ton of companies out there doing interesting things that are willing to pay well for working on code that has that methodology problem. But they are not willing to undertake a full rewrite of their system at the outset before you can start doing anything useful.
At that point you can choose which is more important - the religious war or getting on with your life. When I encounter things like that my vote is a bit of both. I bring habits that allow me to cope with the methodological problem, and incrementally try to create a space where I don't have a problem.
In the process I've found that my preference for trailing commas was a useless idiosyncrasy that I could live without. When I tried living without it, I quickly found that leading commas made my life more pleasant, and I learned to like that formatting style.
Changed formatting is a shock the first time. But it does not take long to retrain yourself to find it aesthetically more pleasing.
When you're making a quick fix to a batch job that does not hit the problematic query for 30 minutes, the cost of messing up the comma is 30 minutes. (Yeah, I know, it all should be properly factored out, and unit tested. But there is a lot of lightly tested code in the real world that behaves just like I said.) Because SQL is stored as plain text, there is real value in making your mental compiler have to do no work to notice stupid syntactical stuff.