Now, at least GNU ls doesn't send or receive email or something. A quick scan of its man page doesn't show many any features grossly out of line with its primary task. But yeah, it has a lot of features for sure, many of which nominally overlap with tasks that could be done by other tools (sort, ignoring backups, -D ("generate output designed for Emacs' dired mode", lol), quoting styles...).
I feel much the same way about Python. Very little of its philosophy expressed back around 2000 or so is in effect today. And there's no one release you can point at and say, "this is it, this is when it stopped being simple", yet, clearly, today it is no longer simple.
The "UNIX philosophy" gets cargo cult by younger generations thanks to a couple of statements in a few worshipped books, yet there is hardly any UNIX clone post V6 where it was actually followed upon.
Backwards compatibility with itself, probably.
If you came away from my post with the impression that this system produces a lot of elegant software, well, I must have screwed up in my writing somehow. What it produces is bodges upon bodges, which are then polished by years of ramming into the corner cases and putting in another bodge to fix them. There is actually something to be said for this design methodology, and it's not all bad, but it rarely produces elegance.