xkcd

That's exactly it. There are a lot of ways to design a fixed wing aircraft, a lot of viable wing configurations. But this particular configuration dominates most of aviation because there's a huge advantage to having all your control surfaces way in back on the end of a long lever.

There are notable exceptions of course, flying wings like the B2 stealth bomber, delta wings with canards like the Erofighter. But both of those configurations are certainly less aerodynamically stable than the traditional arrangement. You really need to have some very important reason to design a plane differently, in those previous examples the reasons are stealth and speed.