As with everything, it depends.

Buffers I believe were created for doing IO operations, wherein you need to move chunks of things around, wherein the underlying net stack needs to fill, flip, copy etc..

If you're building a video compression library with native components, then Buffers are probably going to help.

If you're living purely in Javaland memory managed space, then it's entirely another question, but know that in the vast majority of cases it won't matter.

Try to do a flip and see what happens. Or copy your array to a file, or to a native library. I've never thought of buffers as a replacement for arrays, and I don't think they were ever ment to be. The take away from the comparison is basically to do what we were doing already: use native arrays unless doing so with buffers simplifies your code.