When pulling a Hosted Feature Layer through the AGOL Portal, the field order is not retained. This makes quality control and updating attributes more difficult, as users become accustomed to the familiar order of fields in the attribute table (e.g., beginning, middle, end). When the field order is lost, it significantly slows down the workflow and increases the potential for errors if extra attention is not paid.
I’ve tried multiple workflows to preserve the field order schema, but none have been successful.
An enhancement that retains field order when a layer is removed from a map would be extremely beneficial for our workflows.
A bug has been logged BUG-000172553.
I hope you'll consider this.