Most especially for the Universe/Series/Writing-Events story lists.
The primary reason is to enable us to quickly locate new stories added to the universes/Series/Writing-Events we have already been following WITHOUT needed to peruse lengthy multi-paged story lists, such as for the Swarm Cycle universe.
Other useful options might be to sort by author name or story title.
The current sort seems fairly random and is not strictly "by the listed date" according to what I can see in The Swarm Cycle story list (for one example).
- GrandPaM