> It's also quite important for me to know how much stuff is allocated in given block so I don't blow out the stack and having all the things at the top makes it easier to think about.

With modern compiler backends you haven't been able to reliably reason about stack usage by looking at the number of local variables for quite some time. Even ignoring IR-level optimizations and register allocation, modern compilers will do coloring on the stack slots that remain, meaning that the number of stack locations you end up using is flow-sensitive (and thus moving to the top is actually technically obscuring things).