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Perl isn't included in e.g. BusyBox. The additional overhead of including perl in an embedded distribution could be a valid reason for using sed where you could otherwise have used perl.

vim's regex syntax is unusual and sucky. Thankfully running commands is super-easy:

:%!sed …

Exactly. Use Perl (or maybe Python).

sed is bullshit.

Do you know it is not actually possible to get output from sed that does not contain a newline?

Are you sure? sed has -z, it's useful.