To 'f' or not to 'f'

Under some now ancient version of PHP--probably 6, I had a cron job that 
read:

php -f {my-php-script}

and it ran every day like it was supposed to. Now, under 8.3, the job 
did not execute any more. I removed the '-f' from the line in cron, and 
the job runs. What is the difference between with and without 'f' if 
'-f' is supposed to be superfluous?