What good is the --target option of cp?

If you look at the man page for cp(1) on operating systems where the GNU tools are used, such as Linux, you will see there is an third form that uses the -t option or alternatively the equivalent long form --target.

cp [OPTION]... -t DIRECTORY SOURCE...

So what good is this when you already can do:

cp [OPTION] SOURCE... DIRECTORY

Here's a reason. Suppose the SOURCE list is large and comes from a file or another command. So you have to use the xargs command to invoke cp as many times as necessary to consume the list, without running into command line argument limits. Assuming the source list is one per line, you could do something like this:

xargs -d '\n' cp -pr -t destdir < listofsources

The -t allows the destination directory to be put before the source arguments in the cp command. Without it,  you would have to resort to the interpolation feature of xargs, i.e. -I {}