Exactly! ls is alive, and just exists, mostly. The commits done on it are extremely minor changes to save up 0.0001% of performance and because the APIs it was using are sometimes deprecated. And that's fine!

However, when a new project arrives and does more, suddenly it's dogshit because it's stopped evolving despite doing infinitely more than ls.

Unixheads have a weird inferiority complex when it comes to anything not in coreutils.