Sure, but that's harder to hide. Any user could paste somewhere where nothing gets executed and the expose the hack attempt. Pipe to bash has the interesting aspect of letting the author inject hacks only to people who are not looking.
Anyway, the use case for my runck utility is scripts such as dockefiles or CI automation where I want to download and run installers and I don't want to reduce the bash boilerplate.
I wrote a tool that could be used like that but it's useless if its not ubiquitous (https://github.com/mmikulicic/runck)