In Dubai, which is a massive transit hub, they do the security check upon arrival, before you enter the departures area. They still do some lighter spot checks at the gates, but liquids allowed.
Heathrow as a major transit hub also doesn’t do security checks at the gate, rather it’s when you enter airside. Far better.
Singapore and KL airports are the odd ones out. I suspect because they were built before the security rules required better separation of departing and arriving passengers, and retrofitting the added security paths made less sense financially than just doing checks at every gate.