This assumes that $project will be one shell word…

Can you prove that? (This is a rhetorical question, since your statement is false.)

Well, because if you start caring about the quoting, it is bad style not to quote multi-word variable anywhere? Even if it happens to work in the specific case.

You meant everywhere instead of anywhere? It's your opinion that this is bad style. All you need to do is understand the rules. If the style is that correctness is the most important quality combined with a minimum number of characters under the condition that variables can contain spaces (the general rule is more complicated), then my style (which happens to coincide with the style of experts) is the one to follow.

In the past few years some silly megacorporations have written style guides, which contradict this style in order to save a few dollars on staffing costs (because ignorant people are cheaper). In many cases the style guides have been written by people who themselves don't know what they are doing. I'd prefer it if we did not have people touching code who have to be explained this.

To be honest, I think it's a bit silly to waste my time on even explaining this stuff. My version is more correct that the original version. Why don't you just merge the commit instead of starting a non-productive discussion?

…And this admits it can be multiple words. I do not really understand the logic of this cleanup.

Indeed, this allows a project to be of the form 'my helloworld project', exactly as intended.