Handling spaces in filenames

[Larry Alkoff]

Man rsync says that
"If  you  need  to  transfer  a  filename that contains whitespace, 
you'll need to either escape the whitespace in a way that the remote 
shell will understand, or  use  wildcards in place of the spaces.".

I am regularly doing backups with rsync and notice that files names with 
a space in them copy properly, without any special escape or other 
characters.

Is this a change in rsync?
Is the warning in the man page no longer needed?

I will say that my 'filenames' with spaces are mostly (if not all) 
directory names so perhaps rsync knows to handle directory names better
than file names.

Can anyone enlighten me?

Larry