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This is still the default behavior of `ls` in OpenBSD, very likely all BSD's. I also remember reading one man page on a Linux machine (which presumably is using GNU core utilities) that stated `ls` would always print per line if it was directed to anything other than stdout, e.g. a pipe.

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I think you mean anything other than a terminal. Whatever its output is directed to, whether it's a pipe, a file, or anything else, is the stdout of the ls process.

Do those BSDs allow newline chars to appear in file names?

Yes, and they also don't add single quotes to filenames that contain whitespace characters when displaying them as mentioned in the article.

So then BSD's behavior isn't very useful then, right? You can't actually rely on 1 filename = 1 line.

No because in the case of the "ls" command, it replaces non-printable characters with a question mark '?', including newline characters. I believe the actual source code for this behavior can be seen here: https://github.com/openbsd/src/blob/master/bin/ls/utf8.c

So then BSD can't be guaranteed to accurately display the filename. Either way, you have to pick a side.

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