Is your first/native language SVO (subject-verb-object)? Mine isn't, it's VSO (verb-subject-object) or SOV (subject-object-verb), and for me the first example isn't more readable so I wonder if that also changes our perspective on what option we see as the most natural.

I can admit though that from an IDE point of view having auto-completion upon writing thing and typing the dot and seeing the results is very useful, whereas there is nothing (as far as I know) that comes even close in functional languages where the second example is more typical.