While the reproducible builds efforts try to make builds path-independent, at the moment they often settle for reproducibility when built at the same common path. That's still enough that you can reproduce the build yourself.
Does path-independent mean what I think it means? One thing I hate about Linux is having to set prefix at build time. You can't tar up a software and move to your home directory on another machine. That and the lack of compatibility between base libraries/kernels means you can't hope to upgrade chrome for yourself easily like anyone on Windows or Mac can trivially do.
No, in this case it just means binaries won't contain / depend on the path you used to compile it in.