The godfather of relational calculus languages, Alpha, put the relation context first, and then allowed you to send multiple commands that operate within that context. SQL eventually gave in and added WITH to soft of, kind of, try to get to the same place.

But, ultimately, SQL was designed around the idea discrete function calls rather than unit operations (with continued efforts to try and hack on the latter after the fact), so in that sense, the operator going first does make more sense.