I agree! You can blame me for some of those proposals :-), my thanks to the POSIX team for getting this out the door.

The sed -E option makes it easy to portably use extended regular expressions.

The find -print0, xargs -0, and read -d provide portable ways to securely process lists of files. They were already widely implemented, but now they're officially part of the spec and can be counted on being present in many other places.