The proposed change does not bring any advantage apart from few saved keystrokes and even that is questionable, because it makes the code more prone to misreading/misinterpretation.
I can parse separately quoted string literals in the list (especially when they are highlighted by syntax coloring) much faster than read the one big string literal, while doing the mental split, keeping in mind which separators the author decided to use to make the split, and filtering some hardcoded chars which would otherwise get cut off.