They are recommended when you want speed, but most people writing Python probably never need that much speed (or would probably want numpy anyway), and the few who do likely have more private sources to recommend it for specific occasions. It should probably be used for more things (instead of reaching for numpy at first chance) but is still a niche tool.

The standard array module was more relevant in the distant past, before version 2.6 added the bytearray type. Otherwise, numpy arrays are considerably more useful in virtually every circumstance.

I had never heard of them and when I try to Google Python array v set speed it just returns list v set. I did get the official documentation but it doesn’t go into speed.

These are useful when you need a pointer to an integer for a C or C++ API.