Anyone understand why this query no longer works?
rows is a reserved keyword in MariaDB.

https://mariadb.com/kb/en/library/reserved-words/

Unless you single- or double- or backquote it:

select id as 'rows' from tbl;
select id as "rows" from tbl;
select id as `rows` from tbl;


db&lt;>fiddle here

As commented by dbdemon, rows is now a reserved word in MySQL too, specifically starting from version 8.0.2. See another db&lt;>fiddle demo here.