You can start spring directly, bypassing the wrapper and all of the slow update checks it does before launching spring. I tend to do this to quickly recover after a crash and get back to rejoining a game, for example:
env DISPLAY=:0 SPRING_WRITEDIR=/home/user/Zero-K SPRING_ISOLATED=/home/user/Zero-K SPRING_DATADIR=/home/user/Zero-K:/home/user/Zero-K/engine/linux64/104.0.1-1435-g79d77ca/ /home/user/Zero-K/engine/linux64/104.0.1-1435-g79d77ca/spring --menu 'Chobby $VERSION'
...substituting your home directory for /home/user, and the current engine version for 104.0.1-1435-g79d77ca.
If you don't have a development version of Chobby available (most probably don't), you can replace 'Chobby $VERSION' with the Chobby version to use.
This command invocation was deduced by running strace to take a look at how the standalone wrapper was launching spring, and should be exactly equivalent (aside from the deliberate absence of SPRING_NOCOLOR=1, since I quite like having a color coded infolog).
Because the wrapper isn't used, the lobby will behave roughly like it does after the wrapper has crashed. For example, it won't automatically download new maps, game versions, or thumbnails; and it won't attempt to connect to steam or discord to update your statuses. It'll still download replays, though, and everything you've previously downloaded will continue to work fine.
There's probably a windows equivalent if you use windows, but I'm not sure of the specifics.
