Not in love with GL as someone that's written GL drivers and re-implemented GL on top of modern APIs, but....

for me, the GL style (whatever you decide to call it) seems to make sense from a performance POV. I often want one axis or the translation. It's a single SIMD load since vs if they were stored the other way I'd have to load every 4th float.

Also, while you do type them out in code different from math

    x x x x
    y y y y
    z z z z
    t t t t

If you squint you can view them as columns

    xaxis = [
      .
      .
      .
      .
    ]
    yaxis = [
      .
      .
      .
      .
    ]
    zaxis = [
      .
      .
      .
      .
    ]
    translation = [
      .
      .
      .
      .
    ]

    matrix = [xaxis, yaxis, zaxis, translation]  // 4 columns side by side

Agree, this email format is also so easy to parse. It's like I'm dropped right into the action.