I think we also need to clearly separate two distinct aspects of .pth files:

1. "import <module>; <arbitrary code execution goes here>" lines <--- Kill it with fire
2. "<add this directory to sys.path>" lines <--- This is fine and good and perfectly sensible

It's point 2 that powers things like "pew add", and I don't see any particularly compelling reason to get rid of it.

The "arbitrary code invocation for every single Python execution using that environment" aspect, on the other hand, is mostly a PITA, and used as a workaround for other features being missing (e.g. the PYTHONRUNFIRST proposal in https://bugs.python.org/issue14803).