As far as I know array-based heaps are most efficient with practical workloads (because it doesn't have the overhead & non-locality due to pointers for a tree s

As far as I know array-based heaps are most efficient with practical workloads (because it doesn't have the overhead & non-locality due to pointers for a tree structure). I don't think it's necessary to offer multiple implementations, just as there is only a single well tuned hash table in Python. What matters is that the functionality of an abstract data type is offered.