Alternative to echo

There is an alternative to using echo to pipe to stdin of another command, using the heretofore unknown-to-me '<<<' operator.

echo 'hello' | nl

is equivalent to

nl <<< 'hello'

I'm not sure that the latter is more useful. It looks more elegant if the stream of commands is long for them to be in a consistent left-to-right order, e.g.

echo 'hello' | nl | rev | tee /dev/stderr

looks a lot better to me than

nl <<< 'hello' | rev | tee /dev/stderr