[uranusjr]

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.

[abecedarius]

The times I've used array, it was a common data structure for communicating with a C extension. You could use a Python list, but that's not just slower but more of a pain to deal with on the C side. (This was before numpy was everywhere; I don't know how much fun that might be to work with from C.)

If you're going pure Python then space is a better reason than speed. I'm not sure an array is even as fast as a list.

[uranusjr]

I think I use struct much more when interfacing with C, but I can see array being useful for arrays specifically when you expect more than a couple of elements. Both are still quite niche though.