C considered dangerous

Well, I'm disappointed: I expected some technical reason and not just a pseudo-"readability" choice. As pointed out there and/or in the stackoverflow discussion, if you can't easily find types in your function then you have a bigger problem because the function is too big in the first place.
In some cases having the type closer to where it's used will actually make the type more obvious.
Afraid people don't look at types often anyway - even less often than they should.

In any case this entire readability debate weighs little compared to uninitialized variables which compilers may not all catch + the noise of compilers reporting false positives. No modern language forces declarations at the top, it's a legacy. Safer languages even tend to force the opposite.