I hate this, also. This was a "design pattern" (antipattern) at a previous company. It was incredibly difficult to navigate SQL built like this. We were also asked to write "unit tests" for each micro-function. This was essentially a pointless exercise that compared each function call to a string, copy-and-pasted from the function itself, with no regard to the correctness of the overall query. At least it was easy to make the tests pass.