With the given options, ls is no longer trying to separate "raw" filenames with any character. Rather, it encodes them unambiguously, and hence we can parse the

With the given options, ls is no longer trying to separate "raw" filenames with any character. Rather, it encodes them unambiguously, and hence we can parse the newline-separated output just fine. You can see the same "trick" used in one of the links of your first comment (the one that warns against parsing ls output).