What's the mess? You're not supposed to read the vault as a book.
The first one is one less memory call for the variable value, so that would be more efficient. But that's really not a concern here so it really makes no difference whatsoever. I would consider the second one messier because you would have to make the if statements look the same.
In the end you are the author of your plugin and you decide which method you want to use. You are the one who are going to maintain it.
I'll show you a "cleaner" way tomorrow.