Correct, this comes at the cost of a minimal amount of memory, but an amount which cannot be avoided if I wish to maintain updatability of the screen package. What I'm doing is simply overwriting the symlink, which has a negligible memory footprint of 45bytes)
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 45 Dec 22 03:48 screen -> /tmp/tcloop/screen/usr/local/bin/screen
-rwsr-sr-x 1 root root 241204 Dec 22 03:48 screen
So yep definitely, since I'm copying the screen binary to the file system, it incurs a direct cost of 241204 bytes. However, in my particular situation, I value 241204 bytes of RAM less than I do the version dependency, so it'll all work out.