Why? It seems very rational. Especially if you're just going to run it once to get a value and not as a part of some system.
Do the first thing that works, don't overthink it.
In my opinion, the bottom line with obvious caveats is this - Human-time is more valuable than CPU-time.
If you are shipping at scale then the calculus is different - Don't waste end-users' human-time and their cpu-time and/or server's cpu-time.
If you're writing code with a team the calculus is different - Use/Learn techniques and tools to reduce the teams' human-time wastage plus all the above.
If you're writing code just for yourself the calculus is different - Save your own human-time.