It's also the most relevant information first. I don't care about what day it is if I don't know what month it's in. If it's an unambiguous context they can just be omitted.

Not only that. Processing logs with DD/MM/YYYY in many systems will result in octal base error because of the leading 0 in dates such as 07 08 09, and don't let me talk about how some languages read the back slash / ... pukes in shell

Easily proved to be the best: in every time travel story, the time traveler asks for the date. The unsuspecting drone always responds with DD or MM-DD, and the protagonist has to shout at them “NO! WHAT YEAR IS IT?”

Always start with YYYY.

I rest my case.

Gotta have that good sorting

DD is day in year, I think dd is what you mean. Also, YYYY is week year, so better to use yyyy.

yyyy-MM-dd

Anything else is madness. It’s demonstrably the only logical answer.

YMD is primarily used in:

China, Japan, South Korea, North Korea, Taiwan, Hungary, Mongolia, Lithuania, Bhutan, Sweden

That is one weird country group.

W E A R E I N E V I T A B L E

Unironically yes, because it makes it easy to sort by date.

When you sort by name, the year will get sorted first, then the month, then the day. So it’ll sort like this:

2021-05-19
2021-07-23
2023–06-20

Notice that everything is sorted chronologically. But if you do MM-DD-YYYY then you get this instead:

05-19-2021
06-20-2023
07-23-2021

Notice that the 2023 date is between the two 2021 dates. This is even worse if you do DD-MM-YYYY, because now the first number is changing constantly. It may not be a problem with only three dates, but imagine a spreadsheet with 2000+ entries, or a folder with dozens of files archived by date, to allow for potential rollbacks, versioning, etc…

There’s a reason ISO standards for timestamps list things big to small: YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm:ss in that specific order every time.

Pure beauty.

Yep; William Shatner.