This is used by Wine for manually crafting export tables.
If the input object contains .edata sections, GNU ld references them in the export directory instead of synthesizing an export table using either export directives or the normal auto export mechanism. (AFAIK, historically, way way back, GNU ld didn't support synthesizing the export table - one was supposed to generate it using dlltool and link it in instead.)
If faced with --out-implib and --output-def, GNU ld still populates those output files with the same export info as it would have generated otherwise, disregarding the input .edata. As this isn't an intended usage combination, I'm not adding checks for that in tests.