As a bystander, what would the reasoning be for doing this? I would have assumed that they'd hash each file and use that as a key in a lookup table.

In some languages, symbols are provided which evaluate to a file’s path or directory parent, so program behavior can vary even for the same content hash. That’s just one way paths can bleed in to violate hermeticity/correctness.

It sounds like somebody assuming a docker build, where everybody’s build will use the same file path. It’s still a very silly restriction, because not everything occurs within docker.

It’s an unfortunate safety tradeoff to guarantee consistency. Better visibility into program behavior could fix it.