I could swear I used it to do just that a handful of times in the past. But my brain's been a bit scrambled recently so I'm probably misremembering now. I know for sure I made use of the replace option and was happy it was there and that using it felt better than using sed.

I guess it does make sense now that I think about it that ripgrep wouldn't do in-place edits. If ripgrep never performs writes, there's never a chance of a mistake in usage or bug in the software clobbering files in bulk.