I think the mistake the parent post has made is conflating the kind of ordering you're referring to -- ordering in a tree implementation to allow for O(log n) r

I think the mistake the parent post has made is conflating the kind of ordering you're referring to -- ordering in a tree implementation to allow for O(log n) resolution -- and ordering to preserve the position of each key-value pair as it was in the source structure. These are only the same thing if the source structure already happens to be sorted by some kind of ordering, something that obviously cannot be extended to the general case of preserving positionality. AFAIK, the only two ways to preserve positionality as part of an associative array are (1) to store as a postional list of key-value pairs and use linear search to find matching keys, or (2) to use an additional data structure as an index, either by storing as a positional list and having a additional map from key value into the positions, or by storing as a map and having an additional list of keys stored in positional ordering.