The firmware has been changed to allow more I/O flexibility. The I/O is currently limited to the native I/O pins on the ESP32. To allow more flexible use of these pins, you can now comment out many of them.
If you have a pen machine, you could disable the spindle by commenting out #define SPINDLEPWMPIN. A pen machine might also use a hobby servo for the Z axis, so you could disable the step and direction pins as well.
In most cases Grbl still keeps track of these features, it just does not output the signals.
There are more details on this on this wiki page.
Note: This is currently only on the dev branch