Stack based languages and the APL tradition all follow this pattern, which I agree can be more terse and nice too. I've also been experimenting with right-associative calls which does the same thing but in reverse. For a data pipeline you're more likely to transform from A->B, so I think the post-fix syntax makes sense.

But you can also define a "thread" operator easily for doing subsequent function calls. ala `threaded x { f; g; h }`