Exactly. You lose build isolation for those tools, but you have the convenience of shipping something tested and proven (ideally) alongside the project they support. At the same time, this mess all stays isolated from the parent environment which may be the bigger fight that devs have on their hands - not everyone is using Nix or container isolation of some sort.

I also see this as sugar for `go build` or even `go run`. Or as something way easier than the `go generate` + `//go:generate go run` hack. So we can look at this as a simple refinement for existing practices.

go tool is only slower when (re-)compilation is needed, which is not often. You'd have to pay the same price anyway at some point to build the binary placed in ./bin.