Best way to store HTML dropdown options
Use InnoDB.  At some point, it will be the 'only' one supported.  Anyway, it is actually faster in many benchmarks.

You are talking about dozens or maybe hundreds of rows in all the the tables combined.  You will have trouble noticing sluggishness until you get millions of rows.  "Eschew premature optimization."

On the other hand, if you have a query that is demonstrably slow, let's see EXPLAIN SELECT ... and SHOW CREATE TABLE.  There could be some trivial fix for it.