Comment by _ZeD_

That's the Lindy effect: old tools like ls last because they've already lasted, while modern ones often don’t stick around long enough to.

    the future life expectancy is proportional to its current age

Literally the next line lists its replacement eza.

like good open source, it's now forked by a community instead of having only a single maintainer

eza: https://github.com/eza-community/eza

On the contrary, that's exactly what “modern” sounds like. I wonder when all those tools will go unmaintained. Coreutils, with all their problems, are maintained since before authors of many listed tools were born.