Helpers vs bones

[tillinghast]

I noticed that most of blizzard's wc3 models use the "parent helper that does all the moving, rotating and scaling->child bone connected to mesh, doesn't rotate or anything" structure (left part of the picture) instead of simply using bones for everything (right part of the picture). Why do they use helpers like this, are there any advantages to it?
I took a villagerman model, deleted some fluff, made a copy and converted that copy's helpers into bones. And as far as i can tell, none of the animations look different between them, no jankiness, no weird joints. Helper-less version even weighs a few kbs less.

 

[Hermit]

@tillinghast, you're right, most standard models have helpers (which contain all of the animation data) that are parents of bones (which are associated with particular vertices of the model's mesh). However, as you already said, only the bones are actually needed, which means that it's just unnecessary clutter that was probably caused by exporting the models from an ancient version of the 3ds max software. Of course it is not recommended to do this in custom models since it has no advantages and just doubles the number of nodes.

 

[tillinghast]

there is a case where the bone structure on the left is better than the one on the right
that is when you're making a golem/skeleton/some creature with unconnected limbs and you want a death animation where it falls apart without making a duplicate of the mesh
you freeze the helpers in a death pose and then you only move/rotate bones
that's what blizzard used on rock golem