The only difference from \e is that you don't need to jump to the end of input first, I guess?
AIUI, \e will edit the last thing in history or a specific line number from history, whereas the patch will allow the current line to be edited. That is 99% of the time what I want.
My work flow is typically "Run some queries" => "Go back to some recent query by searching history, often not the most recent" => "Edit query". To do the edit in an editor (without the patch), I've been deliberately nobbling the query once found from history. This allows it to execute (and fail) but places it as the most recent thing in history. Then I hit "\e".
\e is working with not empty line too.You can check