I didn't mean to imply that. But it's actually true. WinSCP is able to find those tools, if they are in PATH. And PuTTY installer adds PuTTY's path to PATH.

Thanks for responding to this goofy question. "My Bad" for not being aware of the option to select components.

A bit puzzled by the comment, "as you have PuTTY installed". That sort of implies that not installing those components with WinSCP would cause WinSCP to use the versions installed with PuTTY rather than pop a "not found" error. (Perhaps an experiment is in order.)

Usually it's safe. Unless the new version of the tools is incompatible with WinSCP. What happens rarely.

Though as you have PuTTY installed too, better might be simply to install WinSCP without the PuTTY tools:
https://winscp.net/eng/docs/ui_installer_selectcomponents
And use the tools from the PuTTY installation.

I use SUMO to alert me to software updates, and it frequently reports that the PuTTY components pagent.exe and puttygen.exe in WinSCP are out of date. Which seems to be the case since PuTTY itself provides an updated version for download, while WinSCP does not.

I am tempted to simply copy these files from the PuTTY location and write over the ones in the WinSCP location. However, there is a nagging feeling that maybe this isn't such a great idea. Any advice either for or against?

On a scale of 1-100, this is probably a "minus 10".