Is there any effort from the GNU organization to solve long-standing issues and pain points such as locales?
As it stands I am generally averse to using GNU tools because my feeling is that they will be slow, clunky and exhibit arcane behavior in particular edge cases. ripgrep is significantly faster than GNU grep -R; fd than GNU find, etc.
For example, before LLMs were common, I once had to spend an entire day getting GNU flex and GNU bison to generate code that was: a) properly prefixed with a custom prefix, not yy_ et. al and b) did not use global variables.
I would have understood if, for backwards compatibility, this was gated behind a --sane flag or similar, but the GNU manuals were, at least at the time, under the confusing impression that what I was doing was advanced usage and used semi-fancy terms like "re-enterant" to describe what should be the normal behavior. I had to toggle several different knobs, some working for macros, others for functions, and the knobs were different for flex and bison.
POSIX locales in particular are an anti-feature, and I say this as a non-English native, so uutils adding support for them feels like bug-compatibility with GNU, not feature-compatibility.
Other issues involve the dynamic linking requirements of glibc and of the nsswitch in a world that would increasingly prefer to link things statically.
I am really saddened if the reaction is just that GNU is the old and stable is the main argument here. Because when you read many GNU documents and manpages, written years ago, you get the feeling that the original authors were looking to do things properly, make breaking changes where they were sane (hence POSIXLY_CORRECT), innovate (Emacs), and overall would not have been particularly swayed by the "old and stable" argument of traditional Unix distributions at the time.
The Rust community seems to be the one making exciting innovative stuff nowadays. uucore is more complimentary as well, ripgrep and fd are much more interesting. Sure, there may be certainly kinks, as you pointed out. But Rust programs can be debugged. Can GNU programs innovate?