I'm honestly curious - what's a use case for scripting the editing of files that's not better satisfied by using a scripting language? I see the value of Arch's focus on minimalism more than keeping ed around in this case, but I'm happy to be wrong.

If your terminal is broken, there are plenty of ways (reset, stty sane, whatever) to fix that. I'm also not sure why having an extra binary on my system is a good safety guard against a broken keyboard.

The ajax term case is valid I guess, though I'm not sure how common that is. I was in a case like that a year or so ago and ended up using cat and sed to get the thing back on the network.