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BSD devs tend to prioritise clean code over speed. I'm not certain of the implementation details here but their approach does make openbsd coreutils a more pleasant read than the GNU coreutils.

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Also clean code usually results in compact code, which used to be effectively the same as fast code for the machines BSD was initially developed for.

I wouldn't be surprised if the BSD coreutils were more performant on older machines with small memory, buffers and prefetch queues (sometimes just a few bytes) than their GNU counterpart.

I would be very surprised. An 8k buffer is hardly a large imposition, and less syscalls has always been hugely beneficial.

Do the various BSD equivalents have to also work on other, esoteric OSen, or do they generally tend to fork a new version only to run on just on that flavour of BSD?

Not exactly an answer but OpenBSD sometimes has different portable versions of their software. e.g. https://www.openssh.com/portable.html

Idk about the stuff that's normally ‘included’ in the distribution (base install of the OS), but NetBSD's package manager supports a ton of platforms. I've used it on Linux and macOS.

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