Try the APA (Curriculum Vitae) citation style

It's easy to modify any style you want to do this. If you tell us 1-2 that you're interested in, we can tell you how.

yes (there's a UI tool, but for something as simple as this, you're almost certainly better of editing the CSL code, which is XML) -- this works about the same in every style, but it'd be helpful to have the most relevant for you since details can differ slightly.

The general instructions for modifying styles are here: https://www.zotero.org/support/dev/citation_styles/style_editing_step-by-step

You want to look at the sort section of the bibliography.

If you want detailed instructions, I really do want a style to start from.

So the relevant section for sorting the bibliography in that style is this:

<sort>
<key macro="contributors-sort"/>
<key variable="title"/>
<key variable="genre"/>
<key variable="issued"/>
</sort>

You'll just want to move the date to the top, so turn that into
<sort>
<key variable="issued"/>
<key macro="contributors-sort"/>
<key variable="title"/>
<key variable="genre"/>
</sort>

Generally putting <key variable="issued"/> should work for most styles.

Note the general instructions, especially about changing style title and ID, in the above-linked step-by-step

See the general instructions: change the filename and the id

Another issue -- this is ascending, and I see from the APA example, that descending required a huge coding effort (afaik)... is there a simple fix, though? Typically, folks like most recent to older ...

See the documentation here. It's literally used as the code example:

https://docs.citationstyles.org/en/stable/specification.html#sorting