Because of its privacy features. It's not a completely transparent ledger like Bitcoin and does a lot of obfuscation.

For example, if you have someone's public address only, you:

• don't know how much Monero that address has.
• can't see all of their transactions and details about those.

check this site: https://www.exploremonero.com/

If someone gives you the view key for a certain transaction you can see its details like with any other crypto (useful for proving you paid for something).

I don't like that it's proof-of-work either but its impact is not big enough to be an environmental disaster like Bitcoin and Ethereum at the moment. It also doesn't encourage the miner behavior of big PoW cryptos because the developers made it ASIC resistant. That makes it consume less power as far as I can tell.

I personally haven't used crypto for speculation, just for payments or storing my money in stablecoins (developing country things).

I don't support the use case of crypto as a wild west stock market. And I do agree that it's quite impractical to use even for tech savvy people which isn't a good thing.