How would you connect a light dependent resistor / photoresistor/ CdS cell at a right angle to a surface mount board?
The fact that there's hardly any commercially available surface mount LDR should tell you something about the obsolescence of these parts, in my humble opinion.
Your best idea introduces an extra, nonstandard step, plus another mechanical component, so that's definitely way worse than introducing a through-hole component.
Considering this is an exercise in &quot;design for manufacture&quot;, then the design problem becomes &quot;what to replace a component with a bad availability and unsuitable mounting with?&quot;, and the answer is, typically, &quot;a photodiode and an amplifier replaces an LDR with an amplifier&quot;.
Then your problem becomes relatively easy:

There's side-looking photodiodes; you need to operate that thing in reverse bias with a series resistor, and amplify the voltage across that, which typically just takes an opamp and two resistors.
Even better would, if you need the bandwidth, be a trans-impedance amplifier (TIA) configuration for the opamp.
Since you're probably doing something with your LDR resistance, too, that might not even be extra effort.