The remarks section of the documentation appears to explain when hFile
is needed:
If the hEvent member of the OVERLAPPED structure is NULL, the system uses the state of the hFile handle to signal when the operation has been completed. Use of file, named pipe, or communications-device handles for this purpose is discouraged. It is safer to use an event object because of the confusion that can occur when multiple simultaneous overlapped operations are performed on the same file, named pipe, or communications device. In this situation, there is no way to know which operation caused the object's state to be signaled.