I've noticed during IMC rating revalidations that some pilots do indeed lose situational awareness if they are offered diverse vectors to the ILS
Everybody will lose SA eventually, if you give them enough vectors, unless they have a GPS moving map, or are working like crazy doing VOR position fixes and plotting them on the map.
On my FAA IR, the goggles came on at about 50ft and then I got about 10 vectors, and then had to intercept a certain VOR radial. This was a pig of a job and obviously totally unrealistic. It was possible only because the timing was rigged to make it possible.
Almost no modern IFR pilot flies without a GPS moving map today. The Q becomes one asking how many instruments can fail before you tell ATC...
There's a time and place for both, of course, but at regional airports when coming in from the opposite side to the approach direction, the procedure has considerable merit.
Track miles means nothing unless you are very very tight on expenditure or fuel. Folloring radar vectors is less pilot workload. You just sit there, watch the GPS map and twiddle the heading bug every so often.
I'd have vectors every time.
The problem is that most (uk) procedural approaches involve flying to the fix and then outbound, then turn back inbound. This system dates back to the goode olde days when men were men, girlz were girlz, and a pilot knew only vaguely where he was, and he had to track to the fix
first. Nowadays, with GPS moving maps, one would just do a self-positioned intercept onto the inbound track, directly from the enroute segment - if necessary at a level allocated by ATC to avoid conflict with other traffic. That is how GPS approaches work: you fly to the nearest IAF and head straight in, along the T shape.