This part of the copyright blurb stems from the GPL use recommendations:
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.en.html
The concept appears to originate in times where version control was per
file, instead of per tree, and was a way to glue the files together.
Ultimately, we nowadays don't live in that world anymore, and this
information is entirely useless anyway, as people are very welcome to
copy these files into any projects they like, and they shouldn't have to
change bits that are part of our copyright header for that.
hence, let's just get rid of this old cruft, and shorten our codebase a
bit.
818bf54632