I think the passed paddings are not of transparent items, so it's not like you'll see what's behind it.
With that said, if your container is one which takes contentPadding, it may be better to use that as it may interact better with scroll positions as those paddings may animate in and out? I'd test it though to see if it has any difference.
The big difference is if the top bar or whatever else is transparent, then if you use the paddings as actual padding you may see no background behind if the container you use has a different color than whatever is behind, but if you use contentPadding it'd have the container occupy the space under the transparent items too, making it look normal again.