Personally I can’t find a use for it. Colors are so vast that I can’t figure out which means what (and they rarely play nice with a custom bg color). And then, all I have to know is whether a file is “->”, “*”, “/“ or “”. Tree+git view could be useful, if not node_modules, .git and other tree spammers. Of course there is an option to ignore, but then my .bashrc grows again while all I need in a project dir is covered by git status -s (yes I can read these capital letters since svn).
It is modern in a sense of presentation, and I see how it may appeal to someone, but not in a sense of ls being old or something. It feels to me like a strange tool that does everything but nothing specifically, as if someone always wanted a nice gui file explorer, but had no courage to admit this “lameness”.
Why spend your time squinting at black and white text?*
I usually spend time on colored output trying to read blue/lightgreen/etc on #444, and because my b/w tools are separated by colored PS1, which emphasizes important* things like hostname, user, cwd, exitcode and puts a newline so that each command is lined up and ends with an additional \n. File being a green file or a blue dir is not as important as me patching a wrong instance.