[sangnoir]

> Well, you can switch to another ls in 10 seconds by "brew install gnutools" or some such.

I did - but I never remember to type "gls" instead of "ls" - if I were that mindful, I'd always put in the flags at the start, where the BSD utils expect them. As sibling comment noted, trailing flags usually happens when I run a command and decide to amend the flags by up-arrowing and typing. A typical result is "ls -al my_dir -tr" when I realize I want to sort by mod date, post-facto.

I've been using GNU utils 95% of the time I've used Unix(-like) systems: I expect "ls -al my_dir -tr" to work: it's 2021 - recognizing flags isn't rocket science.