Scope: how widely in a Tinderbox document is the target operator applied?
Some arguments are designed to pass the identity of a single note or a group of notes upon which the operator then acts, thus affecting the scope of the work carried out.
The identifying data collected is usually the $Path of the note(s) but can be the title ($Name) of the note(s). In this latter case, Tinderbox will assume the $Name value is unique in the document, silently matching the first such $Name as detected in ascending $OutlineOrder and acting only on the first match. A more recent option is to use note $ID values, the only downside being that, read by eye, 10-digit numbers mean little although they are unambiguous to Tinderbox.
Not all arguments are scoping. Scoping arguments are most common in operators that collect or work on lists, including making or removing links.
$ID for notes with problematic characters in $Path or Name
As documented, some characters—such as parentheses '( )' or forward slashes '/'—can in some circumstances confuse Tinderbox's code parser. The most likely context is when using (un)linkTo/From operators. Such usage is a good candidate for using $ID data instead of paths is the current document is known to contain 'difficult' paths or titles (bearing in mind that a path is effectively a list of ancestor note's titles).