What is the reason for gb_Helper_abbreviate_dirs?

Asking because I see no good reason for it and it repeatedly gets in my 
way with its two major drawbacks:

For one, it prevents use of '...' instead of "..." in certain places in 
recipes where the former would flow much more naturally from the fingers.

For another, it makes it more tedious to copy/modify/paste "make" (w/o 
-s) output for some little one-off things like asking the compiler to 
produce -S instead of -c output for some .cxx.