[barrkel]

It's not that common for tools that have been around for decades, and don't have system dependencies (like your network configuration examples do) to change.

egrep and fgrep are used on ad hoc command lines daily, and option alternatives are less convenient to use. I personally use 'egrep -o' and 'fgrep -f <(...)' all the time. I already find it tedious to have to type 'sed -r' and am half-considering wrapping it in an 'esed' variant.

Eliminating egrep and fgrep is change for the sake of change. Removing a couple of hard links from a few bin directories would be the total positive achievement, at the cost of years of work removing the utilities from scripts - or more likely, adding the links back, or variants thereof, like shell scripts which add -E / -F as required.