> I think that when someone uses ls instead of a glob it means they most probably don't understand shell.

In 25 years of using Bash, I've picked up the knowledge that I shouldn't parse the output of ls. I suppose that it has something to do with spaces, newlines, and non-printing characters in file names. I really don't know.

But I do know that when I'm scripting, I'm generally wrapping what I do by hand, in a file. I'm codifying my decisions with ifs and such, but I'm using the same tools that I use by hand. And ls is the only tool that I use to list files by hand - so I find it natural that people would (naively) pick ls as the tool to do that in scripts.