I agree with you krasimir.Putting utility functions at the top of a file, even if they are just a require statement to another file, makes them a lot easier to understand.
I don't agree with this proposal. I do it all the time, because functions declared and called in a function are details to this function. So if you put the function declarations first, you have to go through all the details first before getting to the more abstract code. So first the abstract code (function calls) and then the details (function declarations) in my opinion is a better way to structure the code.