Is processed.url required for ActiveStorage variants?

I’ve noticed here that the recommendation is to to use .processed.url to generate the variant ahead of time and return its url:

But I’m thinking that we can just pass .processed to image_tag as it should transform that into a URL already? I’ve tried to follow through the code path but get lost once we get into polymorphic_path territory.

Storage::Representations::BaseController even returns .processed for set_representation.