Just for once I want to see complete examples of the syntax on an actual advanced query of any kind right away. Sure, toss out one simple case, but then show me how it looks when I have to join 4-5 reference tables to a fact table and then filter based on those things.
Once you do that, it becomes clear why SELECT first won out originally: legibility and troubleshooting.
As long as DBs continue to support standard SQL they can add whatever additional syntax support they want but based on history this'll wind up being a whole new generation of emacs vs vi style holy war.
If you engage the syntax with your System 2 thinking (prefrontal cortex, slow, the part of thinking we're naturally lazy to engage) rather than System 1 (automated, instinctual, optimized brain path to things we're used to) you'll most likely find that it is simpler, makes more logical sense so that you're filtering down things naturally like a sieve and composes far better than SQL as complexity grows.
After you've internalized that, imagine the kind of developer tooling we can build on top of that logical structure.
You'd need to do some grouping in there to be able to get one employee per role instead of a single employee out of the whole data set.