That's what I always tell people advocating for plastic straws. They think plastic straws are great, they drink their cocktails with them and everything.

Then I tell them how when I try to wash my cars by assembling 50 straws into a water hose, the whole plastic straw concept quickly breaks down.

In my opinion you should never use plastic straws.

Best not to have a single query, but to break it down into a number of separate views and join those views for your final query.

That's exactly what I do and why aliases exist.

It's manual effort, but that's documentation always.

I mean, they're also talking about using the same table multiple times - aliases aren't just useful, they're required in that case so the engine knows which one you mean when using a column from one of them.

Best guess without actually seeing these queries, whoever wrote them is using bad aliases (like "foo1", "foo2" and so on) instead of something more reasonable.