Looks like it has something to do with Source Control.  Just a guess and I may be wrong.

Are you looking for hard skills or soft skills as both are critical.

Please post the actual execution plan as a .sqlplan file.

Good question, but I agree with everyone saying that using the ordinal position for sorting is a poor choice.  Although I haven't done it, I can see Jeff's point in...

I haven't had that issue with moving from 17.3 to 17.4.  However, I did have to reinstall my RedGate tools when I moved from SSMS 2016.

Thinking more along the lines of extended events, but then I may be wrong.

Perhaps this will help:

declare @DB varchar(1000)
        , @StrSQL nvarchar (max)
        , @SQLParm NVARCHAR(MAX) = '@StartDate DATE, @EndDate DATE'
        , @StartDate DATE --VARCHAR(10)

You know, I don't think that it is that the questions are getting worse.  I think it is that the people asking questions are just in way over their head...

Or, have scripts that you run against the database to obfuscate the data immediately after the restore.

But I can't see what your results are so I have no idea what is being displayed.