While looking for ways to keep a list sorted irrespective of insertions and deletions, I came across the bisect and sortedcontainers modules.

bisect‘s insort function is O(n) since it combines bisect_left O(log n) and insert O(n)

def insort_left(a, x, lo=0, hi=None, *, key=None):
    """Insert item x in list a, and keep it sorted assuming a is sorted.

    If x is already in a, insert it to the left of the leftmost x.

    Optional args lo (default 0) and hi (default len(a)) bound the
    slice of a to be searched.

    A custom key function can be supplied to customize the sort order.
    """

    if key is None:
        lo = bisect_left(a, x, lo, hi)
    else:
        lo = bisect_left(a, key(x), lo, hi, key=key)
    a.insert(lo, x)

However, an equivalent operation add for SortedList from sortedcontainers module is O(log n) due to this reason.

Now as I understand, it was a design decision to not include sorted containers in Python’s standard libraries – Source.

So between this design decision meant for simplicity and SortedList meant for performance, how is bisect even relevant? Is there a use case where bisect could be preferred?