Fish doesn't do automatic word splitting on variable substitutions like bash does. Like ZSH (afaik), Fish doesn't require you to religiously surround every variable substitution in double quotation marks in case the contents have a space.

Globs work correctly in Bash (not “BASH”), even with spaces in filenames. Yes, you need to quote most variable substitutions[0], but globs are fine.

[0]: except in the RHS of a variable assignment or after the ‘case’ keyword

I do not know about fish, but it behaves correctly in zsh.