Easier I don't know, but safer for sure.

With the current implementation you can accidentally use first heapify_max and then heappop (forgetting the _max), accidentally append something through the normal list append method, change the priority of something unknowing that that breaks the invariant, or run into problems with "Tuple comparison breaks for (priority, task) pairs if the priorities are equal and the tasks do not have a default comparison order".

These headaches could have been mostly removed if these were in a class. And the option to use a custom sequence type could have surely been preserved.