This was proposed about 7 years ago, and rejected at the time: https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/3962

Is it okay if I revive this argument now?

I think it would be useful to have the lens operator <&> in base, which is defined as:

(<&>) :: Functor f => f a -> (a -> b) -> f b

as <&> f = f <$> as

This is analogous to a lifted version of (&) that already present in Data.Function

Cheers,

Sid