Is there any objective benefit to escape sequences over tput?

In people's '.*rc' files I see online or in various code, I tend to see a lot of people who manually use ANSI escape sequences instead of using tput. I had the understanding that tput is more universal/safe, so this makes me wonder: Is there any objective reason one should use escape sequences in place of tput? (Portability, robustness on errors, unusual terminals...?)