>making it suitable for inclusion in the rescue system
People seem to be missing the point. Also NetBSD has what I call a "real single user mode". Last time I had to boot single user, ed(1) was the only editor available without some work. My guess is this new editor will be useful for people who do not want to deal with ed(1).
I have not seen it yet, but I guess it will be included in 11.1.
I think single user has nvi as well.
Edit: apparently it requires /usr to be mounted though