This use of the word "new" is a bit of a stretch. Consider that the "new" wildcard algorithm has been around for as long as Linux has. Possibly longer, although I'd have to check when 4DOS and 4OS2 started providing extended wildcards.
using ls with globbing is redundant: the shell will expand * 1* .png to a list of files, which will then be passed to the argument vector of ls, looking up the files twice. You could just do echo * 1* .png.
ls doesn't do glob matching. ls '*' would try to fstatat (FreeBSD) that character.
No you don't; whether ls is a builtin is mostly irrelevant, but
does exactly what you (I assume) are saying, which AFAIK is a new extension introduced with WinNT's command processor, since the old algorithm...https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20071217-00/?p=...
...would effectively produce a pattern matching all files ending in '.png'.