Parsing, or the lack thereof, is not the point. The point is that standard shells already provide all the tools you need for dealing with lists of files. Want to do something for every file? Write this:

    shopt -s nullglob
    for f in *; do
       …
    done

But never this:

    for f in $(ls); do
       …
    done

They look similar, but the latter runs ls to turn the list of files into a string, then has the shell parse the string back into a list. Even if the parsing was done correctly (and it isn’t), this is still extra work. Looping over the glob avoids the extra work.