The important part to focus on is _between processes_.
Consider Spark and PySpark. The Python bits of Spark are in a sidecar process to the JVM running Spark. If you ask PySpark to create a DataFrame from Parquet data, it'll instruct the Java process to load the data. Its in-memory form will be Arrow. Now, if you want to manipulate that data in PySpark using Python-only libraries, prior to the adoption of Arrow it used to serialize and deserialize the data between processes on the same host. With Arrow, this process is simplified -- however, I'm not sure if it's simplified by exchanging bytes that don't require serialization/deserialization between the processes or by literally sharing memory between the processes. The docs do mention zero-copied shared memory.