When you're lifting heavy having one day at maintenance or a gain in the middle of a cut all of a sudden your body loves to get water weight/bloat/put on fat. It's hard to tell which, so I say 'lose' progress cause that weight/bloat/fat can be 1-3 pounds where I'm trying to lose .5-1 pound a week at most to avoid stretch marks. Normally I'd say this doesn't matter, so long as the trend line is down over all.
--my weirdly specific scenario that maybe interesting to fitness nerds-- However I'm in a fun very specific situation where I'm mtf trans, where I'm in fat redistribution the only science I have is like 2 studies showing that I lose fat is typical for males with normal testosterone and start generating fat as for a female with normal estrogen. So the trans 'bro science' approach is to use that logic and cycle 5-10 pounds on and off over time so you'll have better results appearance wise.
While I've noticed a bunch of anecdotal differences of losing and gaining fat from compared to when I wasn't on hormones 3 years ago and sucking at dieting. Now I'm at about 23-4% body fat that if I lose is coming from very specific sections of my stomach and not evenly distributed. So even at what would be healthy calorie deficit I get stretch marks from anything over 300cal and only small ones (if I do get them) when I'm doing 200-300.