You have been down voted, but the question is reasonable.
One reason is so that invocations of ssh outside of the context of user invocation of ssh at the command line will also have these customizations included. This is especially important for ssh, which has emerged as a main security interoperability tool for Unix systems.
For example, if you use rsync, the tunneling and host alias conventions you set up in .ssh/ will carry over transparently to the ssh tunnel used by rsync.
Another example would be invocations of ssh in scripts (sh/bash scripts, even) that will not or might not read your .zshrc.
Ya, I think the underlying issue is I do things very differently than people on HN.
The idea of creating dependencies on a configuration profile inside a bash script is the exact opposite of what I would do.
I also could not rsync things to my local machine [bandwidth constraints] and would be rsyncing between remote machines, which being a shared environment, I would rely on explicit invocations instead of creating configurations/aliases.
Thank you for telling me how/why other people make different choices. I always do seem to have the blinders of my process is the only process I consider when commenting on HN. :)
One reason is so that invocations of ssh outside of the context of user invocation of ssh at the command line will also have these customizations included. This is especially important for ssh, which has emerged as a main security interoperability tool for Unix systems.
For example, if you use rsync, the tunneling and host alias conventions you set up in .ssh/ will carry over transparently to the ssh tunnel used by rsync.
Another example would be invocations of ssh in scripts (sh/bash scripts, even) that will not or might not read your .zshrc.