The main difference is that by default it won't run the referenced subscripts, only when a file changes.
chokidar seems to be lighter than nodemon:
https://packagephobia.now.sh/result?p=chokidar-cli vs https://packagephobia.now.sh/result?p=nodemon
I thought about backporting this to v4-dev too, but we need to use chokidar-cli 1.x there, so I'll probably leave it as is for v4-dev.
Please try it on macOS and Linux and let me know your thoughts.
/CC @mdo @Johann-S @MartijnCuppens @ysds