Why sort -s -t$'\t' -k 2ndoes NOT work butsort -s -n -t $'\t' -k 2 does?

To work this problem on a local system, you must ensure your input file contains tabs between fields. I pasted the text from a browser and then replaced repeated spaces with tabs using this:

sed -i -E 's/\s{2,}/\t/g' /tmp/pasted-data.tsv

A nice way to confirm that you succeeded, display the columns of text by tab delimiter and expect it to look like a pretty table:

column -ts$'\t' /tmp/pasted-data.tsv

can be managed like:

sort -rnk2 -t $'\t'

Simple One Line Code

sort -r -n -k 2 -t $'\t'