One nice development in this space is the narwhals library - it is a dataframe agnostic library. It allows you to seamlessly switch between pandas, polars, modlin, or any of the variations coming out.

Narwhal is still fairly new, but I expect its usage to spread since most packages only require rudimentary dataframe manipulation (set a value, math been these two columns, etc) where the limited api surface is not a problem.

Narwhals is also a much cheaper dependency to add than polars/pandas/etc so it is a somewhat easy sell to incorporate.

You can convert to numpy using .to_numpy().

It's also got much better support for more complex array shapes (e.g. each row storing an array). At least it did last time I used pandas!