What's the difference between loading fixtures and importing it directly?

[LauraBeatris]

I've started to use Cypress recently and in order to stub API responses, I'm using the fixtures API.

I've created many mocks based on JSON files, inside the fixtures folder. In order to load the fixtures, there're many approaches:

cy.fixture('logo.png').then((logo) => {
{...}
})

cy.intercept('GET', '/route', { fixture: 'mock.json' })

But referring to the docs:

Load a fixed set of data located in a file.

I would like to ask, what's the difference between loading fixtures using cy.fixture and importing it directly?