Shell Programming and Scripting

It is far better. Redirection done that way does not require the shell to launch a new process, which is a huge benefit. Also, should filenames happen to be a formidable size, the version using backticks would try to cram the whole thing into one string and cut off most of it, where the loop version can gracefully deal with any list of arbitrary size by reading names one at a time.

And yes, the former does matter even in this day and age. Computers are faster than they used to be, but processes are also bigger and more elaborate than they used to be; launching a new process remains one of the most computationally expensive operations there is, where simple redirection costs nearly nothing next to it.