It's called driftsort because it's derived from another sort I made, glidesort: https://github.com/orlp/glidesort. Glidesort is a bit faster still for large inputs, however it was too large and complex for inclusion in the standard library, and suffered from code size penalties on small inputs. So driftsort is a slimmed down version more appropriate for general purpose.
No, but it was also named in the 60s. If someone was three comments deep replying to people asking about it, at some point someone would say "it's quick and in place because it does a recursive partition".
