chore: address issues identified in code review on pandas docs PR

[tswast]

pandas-dev/pandas#45544 (review)

Once we've tried out those suggestions, I think it'd be good to re-open that PR so that we're using publicly documented methods here.

[MichaelTiemannOSC]

+1

Can we get this back on track?

[chalmerlowe]

@tswast

This appears to be a reminder to head off to pandas to get a PR finalized over there.
I see that the PR (and a related one) did not get finalized.

Do you have strong feelings about this? It is stale.

[tswast]

Additional comments in pandas-dev/pandas#56755 that might affect our implementation here.

[tswast]

Discussed offline that all current uses of numpy extension array are more-or-less superseded by ArrowDtype in pandas itself, so this package is mostly useful for older pandas + pyarrow combinations. If we do continue to use numpy extension array, though, this issue is an important one to keep open.