Could be. The thing is, it kinda doesn't matter; what matters is, what will result in the least bugs/vulnerabilities now? To which I argue the answer is, keeping GNU coreutils. I don't care that they have a head start, I care that they're ahead.

fileutils-1.0 was released in 1990 [1]. shellutils-1.0 was released in 1991 [2], and textutils-1.0 was released a month later in the same year [3].

Those three packages were combined into coreutils-5.0 in 2003 [4].

[1] https://groups.google.com/g/gnu.utils.bug/c/CviP42X_hCY/m/Ys... [2] https://groups.google.com/g/gnu.utils.bug/c/xpTRtuFpNQc/m/mR... [3] https://groups.google.com/g/gnu.utils.bug/c/iN5KuoJYRhU/m/V_... [4] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2003-04/msg00000...