Ideally, of course, it would’ve been nice if content was always visible. In practice, this is often impossible. And even without an ability to provide the full content easily, reality might require you to make a choice: either you use text-overflow and get at least a marker that the content is clipped, or you clip it hard with overflow: hidden, or get content overlapping other content, thus making even more content inaccessible, or multitude of other things that can happen.