It's all in the title, really.
In the Babel documentation, there is the following line on the page describing babel-runtime
Another purpose of this transformer is to create a sandboxed environment for your code. Built-ins such as Promise, Set and Map are aliased to core-js so you can use them seamlessly without having to require a globally polluting polyfill.
The polyfill is just that, a separate JavaScript file which is included which shims up some missing things.
I've tested the polyfill vs. using babel-runtime with my build tools (webpack), and my files are slightly smaller when I use babel-runtime.
I'm not developing a library or plugin, just a web application, and also do not care about the global scope being polluted. Knowing this, other than the slightly smaller final filesize, are there any other practical benefits or points in using the runtime over the polyfill?