What is the difference in behavior? They both look like they would delete the user's home directory. I assume the latter would try to delete a directory literally named with a tilde instead?

The latter passes each item in the list into the child processes’s argv, as-is, without the shell parsing them. That means this would delete a single item named “~/ some file”, spaces and all, instead of three items named “~/“, “some”, and “file”.

Edit: I’m typing this on my phone, so brevity won over explicitness. The latter probably wouldn’t expand ~. Imagine a file named “/home/me/ some file” for a better example.