Advantages of "middle" tables in one-to-many relationships
There are very few scenarios in which you would probably benefit from your second design:

One is if there is a sub-typing scenario where only certain a certain sub-type had the relationship (and the super-type doesn't) and the sub-type has other additional fields, besides the foreign key.

Another might be where the existence and value of the foreign key needs to be controlled for security reasons at a different level of granularity than the rest of the entity containing the foreign key.  Most DBMSs can handle security per table.  Most don't handle security per column.