[mickeyp]

It's not unbelievable if you know and use Emacs and dired.

dired will use `ls' if it is available. You can also control the arguments passed to `ls' if you want to customize sort order and suchlike. You cannot trivially do this if it's hardcoded as syscalls.

Emacs's buffer concept specifically works around the idea of annotating the output of common coreutils commands and annotating them so they are interactive in Emacs. That means you can combine `find' + `ls' and show a collated list of files matching the things you want. That is very powerful.

Oh, and you can swap out `find' or `ls' with anything that emits a similar format (or customize Emacs to interpret it differently).

Now your readdir, stat, etc. equivalents require significant development effort.