Placing bypass capacitors after VCC reaches the IC
What is important, is to have a low inductance path between the decoupling capacitor and the IC pin. Any inductance reduces the effectiveness of the capacitance. Putting the capacitor "after" the supply trace means that the capacitor will need to be recharged via a higher inductance, but I can't see why this would matter.

Low inductance = short and wide traces. The really wide trace under the IC has fairly low inductance so putting the decouplers to the left and right of the IC in your diagrams is usually effective. It seems possible that your alternatives could be just as effective, assuming that other things weren't compromised. 

Note that the inductance and capacitor form a resonant circuit, the filter will not be effective at the resonant frequency. So, designers are often using multiple values of decouplers to solve this. Like 0.1 uF and 0.01 uF, or for a high-frequency board, maybe 0.01 and 0.001 uF

There are high-tech (i.e. expensive) tools to analyze the effectiveness of your decoupling. I have never personally used them, they came along after I stopped designing boards myself.