When pleasew is invoked from a path other than the repo root (e.g., ../repo/pleasew or /absolute/path/to/pleasew), it fails to find .plzconfig because it looks in $PWD rather than the directory where pleasew is located.
For me this looks like a bug.
It would be more sensible to do something like this instead:
PLZCONFDIR="$(dirname "$0")"
CONFIGS="$(cat <<- EOS
${PLZCONFDIR}/.plzconfig.local
${PROFILE:+${PLZCONFDIR}/.plzconfig.${PROFILE}}
${PLZCONFDIR}/.plzconfig_${OS}_${ARCH}
${PLZCONFDIR}/.plzconfig
${HOME}/.config/please/plzconfig
/etc/please/plzconfig
EOS
)"