Except it doesn't work fine, its poor design is one of the reasons for the modern replacements
I could imagine another utility having a different feature set that people find useful, but in my experience gnu ls always does what it claims to do, and is so foundational that it's a de facto standard when working with Linux.
The desire to "replace" such well established utilities seems misguided to me - by all means add on additional utilities that help you out, but I think it would be wise accept the fact that due to its long history "ls" and similar tools are not going to be replaced any time soon.
It's not wise to accept broken tools just because they persist, that's just mindless conservatism
If an ls replacement could somehow handle directories with >10^4 files faster, then I'd switch.
alias ls='ls -U'
(it probably helps that I use a filesystem - btrfs - that is fundamentally append-based so gives a meaningful order even with -U)