Thank you for the replies everyone! I've put all the solutions together here - I've kept the behavior of deleting only a single value, but the comparison with deleting multiple indicies by choroba here is very interesting too! I've included Eily's solution that leaves the array out of its original order too.

use warnings;
use strict;
use Benchmark qw/cmpthese/;

my @numbers = ( 'a'..'t' );
my $index = 3;
my $expect = 'abcefghijklmnopqrst';
use constant TEST => 0;

cmpthese(-2, {
    splice => sub {
        my @output = @numbers;
        splice @output, $index, 1;
        join("", @output) eq $expect or die if TEST;
    },
    grep => sub { # choroba
        my @output = @numbers[ grep $_ != $index, 0 .. $#numbers ];
        join("", @output) eq $expect or die if TEST;
    },
    slice => sub { # hippo
        my @output = @numbers[ 0..$index-1, $index+1..$#numbers ];
        join("", @output) eq $expect or die if TEST;
    },
    hash => sub { # bliako
        my %ha; @ha{0..$#numbers} = @numbers;
        delete $ha{$index};
        my @output = map { $ha{$_} } sort {$a <=> $b} keys %ha;
        join("", @output) eq $expect or die if TEST;
    },
    hash_slice => sub { # swl
        my %ha; @ha{0..$#numbers} = @numbers;
        delete $ha{$index};
        my @output = @ha{ sort {$a <=> $b} keys %ha };
        join("", @output) eq $expect or die if TEST;
    },
    swap => sub { # Eily
        my @output = @numbers;
        $output[$index] = pop @output;
        join("", sort @output) eq $expect or die if TEST;
    },
    pop_sort => sub { # Eily's + sort
        my @output = @numbers;
        $output[$index] = pop @output;
        @output = sort @output;
        join("", @output) eq $expect or die if TEST;
    },
});

__END__

               Rate     hash hash_slice    grep pop_sort   slice    sw
+ap  splice
hash       113253/s       --       -10%    -78%     -82%    -84%    -8
+7%    -87%
hash_slice 126029/s      11%         --    -76%     -80%    -83%    -8
+5%    -86%
grep       518838/s     358%       312%      --     -17%    -28%    -3
+9%    -41%
pop_sort   627138/s     454%       398%     21%       --    -14%    -2
+6%    -28%
slice      725216/s     540%       475%     40%      16%      --    -1
+4%    -17%
swap       846179/s     647%       571%     63%      35%     17%      
+--     -3%
splice     873809/s     672%       593%     68%      39%     20%      
+3%      --
[download]

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