Lede and Lead

'I came across an article recently in which the author makes an aside about the alternative spelling of 'lede' - as in the 'lede paragraph'.

I am familiar with the alternative spelling and the meaning, and one might think that the alternative spelling is just an old-fashioned version that has now mostly fallen into disuse.

To check, I decided to look up the origin of the word in the Online Etymological Dictionary, which has this to say:

lede (n.)By 1965, alternative spelling of lead in the newspaper journalism sense, to distinguish this sense from other possible meanings of the written word, perhaps especially the molten lead used in typesetting machines.