With WP-CLI’s search and replace the process was easy and I never saw it as a major inconvenience, but it sounds like a good update. My understanding by reading the article is that we will probably have to do the search/replace anyway, so WP-CLI will still be the way to go, at least for me.

Having relative URLs in general might be an interesting feature on the same direction, but I remember reading an old discussion about that, concluding that it’s not something that will be implemented.