I do not like long options. We have a different culture and tradition that has a steep learning curve, but has led to the last living usable, daily driveable CLI. Long options are great for scripts but ruin the usability of CLI as a UX. This is just a comment and not a request for changes or nack. Cc'ing community leaders for review, and manpages since this is a manpage change.

This is for compatibility with GNU ls, where this is an equally long option.
We already distribute a system where ls is an alias.

Supporting the GNU ls option (--group-directories-first) as a long option seems fine to me. For the FreeBSD-specific extension the similar long option is probably ok. If -G wasn't already claimed by color ls perhaps that would have been a good candidate, but there are very few remaining single-letter options.