The names of these utilities are bad. I have literally no idea what any of them do. The same could be said for standard unix utilities, true, but they have 50+ years (in some cases) of brain bake in, and have the advantage of names that have _some_ relation to their function (ls : list files :: exa : “extract the list of files from a dirent?”)
At some point you have to accept that if you want to know something, you have to learn it. At one point, you didn't know grep, awk, sed, etc... And then you learned them.
Or you can just stick with the old tools if you prefer not learning a new thing - that's a perfectly valid option.
Yes, you can do that. But that exasperates the system portability problem. The real solution is for some distro to, gasp, decide that POSIX compatibility can be done with utilities in /opt/posix (or something) and do widespread replacement by default. But that’ll never happen…