Right - and you can 'squish' fiberglass or Rockwool or similar between metal mesh and front-mount it.
That was the basis for Richard Clark's legendary Grand National, and I even think it was SpeakerWorks who sold USD front mount kits that looked like opaque speaker grilles. I don't believe those were tunable, but they did come with some passive filter/compensation box... I don't recall specifically.
I was just assuming that was the application here. Pretty interesting regardless!
You may be thinking of other benefits - it just popped into my head as a solution to the kick risk. I don't think anyone dings for those kind of ergonomic limits these days in competition, and it does look cool regardless.