Why does vite use dirname(fileURLToPath(import.meta.url))?

The vite build documentation gets the directory of vite.config.js like this:

const __dirname = dirname(fileURLToPath(import.meta.url))

And I was curious why it’s being done like this. According to this question we can get the __dirname directory via import.meta.dirname for more recent versions of node, so is const __dirname = dirname(fileURLToPath(import.meta.url)) just an older way of doing it?