Comment by j-kidd

Looking at the examples from the official documentation, I agree with your sentiment. Indeed, the conciseness can cause some confusion to people familiar with the existing scoping rules.

IMHO, it's a good thing if LATERAL is only added as some kind of syntactic sugar. I once had to use LATERAL in DB2 as a band-aid solution for its broken scoping rules: https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/mydeveloperworks/blogs/SQ...