What is a real-world use-case/need for a left-recursive grammar?
There are probably better reasons than this, but one nice thing about left recursion is you get parse trees that naturally represent left associativity. You expect 5 + 3 + 2 to be evaluated as (5 + 3) + 2, but when parsed with the right recursive transformation you show, the parse tree would be the opposite.

This doesn't seem to matter until you start thinking about type coercion (Right word?). Consider 1u / 2u / 1.0f in C. (1 / 2) / 1.0 = 0 / 1.0 = 0.0 but 1 / (2 / 1.0) = 1 / 2.0 = 0.5.