Funnily enough, rsync is one of the commands for which you might be more tempted to use * instead of going up a directory, because the relative path names go over the wire.

besides ./* i also like to use star.ext or even a* b* c* depending on the contents of the directory.

rsync also used the local/only/path/./local/and/remote/path convention where the path before the /./ is not sent to the remote side