It’s simple actually, curl has a bug bounty program where reporting even a minor legitimate vulnerability can land you at a minimum $540

That’s true, I was mostly speaking to that specific use-case. It certainly sounds like it has generally superior functionality to ls, but for me personally it doesn’t beat out the utility of already being present on every linux system I’ll touch.

That’s unlike something like rsync which is genuinely more useful than scp for anything other than simple file transfers.

The default output of ls is uncolored, but some distros include an alias in your .bashrc for ‘ls’ to ‘ls --color=auto’, so you definitely don’t need a whole other utility just for colored output