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xigoi

What about 2020-07-12 requires familiarity?

12 Jul 2020 requires knowing the names of months in the current locale, which is inconvenient.

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It could also mean 7 Dec 2020

I've never seen anyone write dates as YYYY-DD-MM. That's even crazier than MM/DD/YYYY.

Americans

I know that Americans use MM/DD/YYYY. But YYYY-DD-MM???

And I've never seen anyone write time with minutes or seconds before the hours.

Time: hh:mm:ss, never mm:ss:hh or ss:mm:hh

Why should the date format be any different?

Time goes from the largest to the smallest: hours, minutes, seconds. And the same applies to date: years, months, days.

I've certainly seen things like "ten past four" written, and it's commonly spoken, but so are "four ten" and "sixteen ten".

But the date is most commonly spoken in Europe (including in Britain and Ireland) in the form "twelfth of August, twenty twenty-two", so 12/8/2022 (the most common date format in UK/IE) follows from that.

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