Same thing. MC was made to emulate NC. And of course there are actually countless filesystem browsers. Even xtree was probably not the first since that was on ms-dos, and I bet there were some on the 8-bit machines before that.

But this one's aim seems to be a bit specific and not simply to be a filesystem browser (file manager) but specifically to try to be an "interactive ls". IE somehow feel like ls. Though I don't know why. It doesn't seem more useful than a normal file manager. I think it's just down to a very fine point of aesthetics, which is fair enough.