You don't need it for phpMyAdmin. The comment was mentioning the ssh tunnel feature as an advantage in desktop clients like navicat, which allows you to access the database while still running it on localhost.
Yes you connect from your desktop to the server with Navicat
Also means you are more secure since PHPMYADMIN has a history of vulnerabilities and less to run on the server, so your database server can run mysql and nothing else (well maybe stunnel for encrypted connection to your app servers)
