This allows for client agent to be run in a more stateless manner where they may be abruptly terminated and not expected to come back. If advertising a per-agent reconnect timeout using the advertise_reconnect_timeout configuration when that agent leaves, other agents will wait only that amount of time for the agent to come back before reaping it.
This has the advantageous side effect of causing servers to deregister the node/services/checks for that agent sooner than if the global reconnect_timeout was used.
Matt Keeler