Acid rain is another success story for “making a giant collective change to fix a nearly invisible problem”.

I think one major difference is that there are enormous companies and entire countries whose way of life truly depends on pumping fossil carbon out of the ground. It wasn’t that way for CFCs or NO_x. Sure, Dow/DuPont/whomever surely lost some profitable investment in freon plants, but they had other business as well, and their old customers switched to buying the new refrigerants from the same suppliers.

It mostly doesn’t matter.

If it’s a high-current, high-frequency, or low-noise circuit then maybe the inductance or resistance of those traces would matter, but they’re very short so probably not.

If you’re mass-producing it, then sometimes the reflow or wave solder process works better if the traces leave the pads in particular ways. You’d talk to your manufacturer about this.

If this is a hobby project, you’re overthinking it; arrange them in a way that pleases you!