Interesting. I’ve tried macOS and OpenBSD and they both require using ping6 to ping IPv6 addresses. I wonder if FreeBSD changed this recently or if it was always that way. Regardless, macOS is the elephant in the room here as it’s a lot more popular than any of the (other) BSD’s.
Not true. FreeBSD:
> ping -- send ICMP or ICMPv6 ECHO_REQUEST packets to network hosts
https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?ping(8)