Is there a straight forward way of adding this behavior behind some sort of flag or target field config? https://github.com/pantsbuild/pants/issues/20642

I'm not sure it needs to be gated on a flag, I think this is what the behavior should always have been, and is highly likely what users expect

Is this an easy change to make?

I'd need to look at the code, but it's probably not easy enough for someone with little codebase context to tackle

FWIW I was thinking of something hacky like the equivalent of a shell script wrapper that launches the process with access to stdoud/err and then doesn't wait for the return

Hmm, well, trial and error is useful here, it provides information even if not a solution