It's almost as if people used these tools together enough, that they made an effort to make them work well together. ;)

Seriously, "du -h | sort -h" is a regular command for me.

If you do it quite a bit you may want to check out ncdu, it is an ncurses directory size viewer. Super handy and fast for what it does.

curses is actually less useful to me. It's often mixed with a grep and a head or tail with a tee.