Difference between pushd/popd and sub-shell+cd

I'm trying to understand if there are any benefits of using: pushd my_dir make all # ... or something else popd vs ( cd my_dir make all # ... or something else ) or is it merely a preference thing? I guess the latter notation can have issues like you may need to set -e (and other flags again), but it still carries out the exit code of its last command, and looks better in terms of syntax.