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You can do it in compound commands as well:

while read -r LINE

do printf %s "$LINE"

done <<FOO

foo

bar

baz

FOO

This is faster than using cat (one less path lookup, one less fork, one less exec, read is builtin), works on all shells.

There is a <<-'EOF' as well (trims left tabs and does not expand vars).

Another cool trick that only bash and zsh have is `printf -v NAME`, which prints to a variable instead of stdout. You can use it to avoid subshells (one less fork for each subshell avoided).

Trimming version does not trim whitespace indentation. I guess point goes to “tabs” camp.

Correct, though you could pipe to sed and trim leading spaces with relative ease:

sed 's/^ *//' <<EOF

Which I'd prefer anyways because it's less cryptic. I try to stay away from the obscure, rarely used notations because I'll always have to look it up in StackOverflow anytime I come back to it. These can be confusingly sharp edges.

https://linux.die.net/man/1/bash "Here Documents" and "Here Strings" sections.