Why aren’t more navigation bars on the right hand side?

In languages that we read left-to-right, icons are usually on the left of filenames etc. Thus, everything is aligned to the left.

If the navigation bar is on the left, this creates an awkward set of spaces between the navigation items and the content as each line can be of a different length.

However, if the navigation was on the right, you could have a neat alignment “flush” with the page. And vice versa for languages read RTL.

Moreover, the icons could be on a sort of minimized strip / drawer which lets you quickly click on one of them, or you could expand the drawer and pin it to see the whole navigation.

You already have hamburger menus on mobile phones appear in this way, and Google has this minimization into a strip of icons on the left, but it makes more sense to have it on the right, as I mentioned above.

Finally, the content would be the first thing people see, and then they’d notice the navigation.