Within PL/pgSQL, CREATE TEMPORARY TABLE is still (sometimes a lot!) slower than just SELECTing an array_agg(...) INTO a variable, and then `SELECT ... FROM unnest(that_variable) AS t` to scan over it. (And CTEs with MATERIALIZED are really just CREATE TEMPORARY TABLE in disguise, so that's no help.)
But isn't this exactly how temp tables work? A temp tabe lives in memory and only spills to disk if it exceeds temp_buffers[1].
[1] https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/runtime-config-resou...
Just spitballing here — I think the difference might come from where the metadata required to treat the table "as a table" in queries has to be entered into, and the overhead (esp. in terms of locking) required to do so.
Or, perhaps, it might come from the serialization overhead of converting "view" row-tuples (whose contents might be merged together from several actual material tables / function results) into flattened fully-materialized row-tuples... which, presumably, emitting data into an array-typed PL/pgSQL variable might get to skip, since the handles to the constituent data can be held inside the array and thunked later on when needed.