The other case allowed us to avoid the off-by-one-ness the string concatenation in MQL since the query was being constructed on the fly. Also many of the points made in your link also reference generated, not hand-written SQL: 
> If the list of conditions is not known at compile time and is instead built at run time

There are also many opposing views in that thread:
> dealing with trailing ANDs or COMMAs isn't dirty... nothing is cleaner by having 1=1 all over your SQL

The real solution is to write a helper function that everyone uses, but I can at least see the purpose of the hack. Here we're just writing a bona-fide SQL query, so we don't gain anything. There's the same argument for Javascript: put your commas and semicolons at the beginning of the next line instead of the end of the current line so that commenting out lines is easier.

The reason I'm giving you pointless hell about this is because I'm still trying to find areas where we can be more consistent about how to convey logic. This is a minor thing, obviously, but the principle holds: if we're not willing to do it everywhere, then we should do it nowhere; and I'm just trying to plant this concept in the back of everyone's minds.