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.