If you deliberately chose a specific example then you forgot what this discussion was about? You're giving an existence proof. Yes, there exist situations where

If you deliberately chose a specific example then you forgot what this discussion was about? You're giving an existence proof. Yes, there exist situations where it's fine. But this discussion was about what constitutes good habits, not about cherrypicked counterexamples. The whole point of paying attention to good and bad habits is that they sometimes make a difference, and if your habits are bad, you'll sometimes get yourself in trouble. And it's not like you can reasonably expect shellcheck to distinguish the benign cases from the potentially problematic ones either. It has to give you a recommendation about what constitutes good habits, and avoiding redundant calls to cat is a good habit for all the reasons I just listed, even if in some cherrypicked cases it provides ~no benefit.