In macOS Big Sur Apple has removed the dropdown menu for sorting the emails. You can still sort your emails but the options are a bit hidden.
Mail has had a dropdown menu for sorting above the list of emails for a longer time. Here is how this looks like in High Sierra:
Under Big Sur the menu is gone:
Using the sort menu
Select View -> Sort by and you get the same functionality that the dropdown menu had:
Mail Archiver has a similar menu. I'll bet with you that nobody has used the menu except me.
Using column layout
Select View -> Use Column Layout like this:
You will get a view that is similar to Mail Archiver's list of emails. You can click on the header to change the sort direction. Clicking again on a selected column changes the sort direction:
In the screenshot it's not very visible. But I find the column layout too dense. What is worse in my eyes is the missing ability to differentiate lines. In former times we had alternating row colours which gave you a nice difference between the rows. Those are out of fashion. Even in Mail Archiver I'm now using very light lines between the rows. But those are better than nothing:
Also, in Mail Archiver you can increase the font size.
As result I prefer the non-column layout in Mail.