No statistically significant penalty or profit:

$ hyperfine -w1 -r5 'pants -V' './pants -V'
Benchmark 1: pants -V
  Time (mean ± σ):      1.100 s ±  0.007 s    [User: 0.508 s, System: 0.056 s]
  Range (min … max):    1.089 s …  1.107 s    5 runs

Benchmark 2: ./pants -V
  Time (mean ± σ):      1.106 s ±  0.005 s    [User: 0.523 s, System: 0.044 s]
  Range (min … max):    1.102 s …  1.115 s    5 runs

Summary
  'pants -V' ran
    1.01 ± 0.01 times faster than './pants -V'

Thanks @curved-television-6568

I guess there is a caveat. This only works from this commit forward in the Pants repo: https://github.com/pantsbuild/pants/commit/f807172caadc2c610aa7f8d48b06f58b7ef9d453 So if you go back in time, you'll get prompted to set

pants_version

to latest stable in

pants.toml

and you can just answer no and go back to using

./pants

in that older codebase.