Are there, currently, noticeable performance advantages in using Buffer / Uint8Array instead of plain arrays?

I believe, nowadays, JavaScript engines such as V8 are always able to detect when an array has only numeric values in the 0-255 range and, thus, store it as an unboxed Uint8 array. As such, one could expect they're as efficient as the strongly typed counterparts. Having a single array type across your codebase is, though, much more convenient than having many.

In 2017, is there still a noticeable performance advantage in using Buffer/Uint8Arrays rather than plain arrays?

via MaiaVictor