MiKTeX 21.7: Difference between pdflatex.exe and miktex-pdflatex.exe

For a while I was struggling with an error in the pdf-output of one of my documents. On one page, half of the text in a line was missing. On the next line, the text just continued without the missing part. Unfortunately, I did not manage to build a minimal working example, as the problem always disappeared when any random parts of the approx. 150 preceding pages were missing.

Finally, I found out that my Texmaker 5.0.4 was using the executable pdflatex.exe in the MiKTeX binary-path (UserAppDataLocalProgramsMiKTeXmiktexbinx64pdflatex.exe). TeXworks 0.6.6, which came with the MiKTeX distribution, instead was using miktex-pdftex.exe (UserAppDataLocalProgramsMiKTeXmiktexbinx64miktex-pdftex.exe) with the argument "-undump=pdflatex" and the compiled pdf did not show the problem described above. So my solution to the problem was adopting the binary path and the arguments of TeXworks in Texmaker and using miktex-pdftex.exe instead of pdflatex.exe.

Everything is fine now, but I am wondering what the difference between the behaviour of the two executables is? In the MiKTex documentation it seems, as only the "miktex-…" variants are documented. So can it be concluded that only those shall be used? But why are the variants without "miktex-…", like pdflatex.exe then also part of the distribution?

Because of curiosity, it would be great if someone could help me with bringing some light to those questions.