Reward dependent on (state, action) versus (state, action, successor state)
Your intuition is correct. In the most general case (Sutton's definitions), the model of the environment consists of the state transition distribution and the reward distribution. The latter one is rarely considered, as many times the reward is being assigned by the modeler, dependent only by the selected action from the current state and being deterministic. As you mentioned it simplifies a lot the coding implementation.