Sorry, I was not meaning it in that sense at all ; rather I was keen to see that if you were taking this much trouble to understand that you weren't getting some mis-information somewhere.

As I have said, and as you quoted, whilst SUMPRODUCT is not array entered, it is an array function in its conditional usage. This means that if does not need to be explicitly told to array process the constituent parts, which is one Ctrl-Shift-Enter does, as it implicitly 'knows' this.

However, if there is some function embedded within that does not implicitly process an array, it is that function that needs the explicit CSE, not SUMPRODUCT, although of course it is the whole formula that gets encapsulated thus.

So whilst this simple SP is not array entered

=SUMPRODUCT(--(A2:A200=MAX(A2:A200)))
this one, which achieves the same, does need to be array-entered

=SUMPRODUCT(--(IF(A2:A200=MAX(A2:A200),1))
purely because it has the non-array IF function within it.

But ... again as I said, if you have a SP formula that needs array-entering, you don't need SP, you can use an array-entered SUM alone

=SUM(--(IF(A2:A200=MAX(A2:A200),1)))