Order by not working on nested populate

Questions and Answers
2

Since you are using the query engine it user the KNEX syntax, so you would need to use orderBy, you can learn more from the docs here

strapi.db.query('api::article.article').findMany({
  orderBy: {
    author: {
      name: 'asc',
    },
  },
});

For your above example to work, instead of using db.query you would use entityService instead.

strapi.entityService.findMany('api::article.article', {
  sort: {
    author: {
      name: 'asc',
    },
  },
});

You can see the docs here

Hope this helps.