What I like most about MC is oddly off by default. Under "Options" > "Panel options" there is an option under "Navigation" for "Lynx-like motion". Once this is on, you can navigate in/out of directory structures with the left and right arrows on your keyboard. It makes it super quick and easy to move around a file system without a bunch of successive cd/ls/etc commands (or other tools)

Exploration — you are entering the unknown codebase, and you _see_ file and directory structure, presented before you. The unix tools are good if you planned beforehand what are you going to do; mc is great for when you don’t know yet.

Targeted selection — it is really easy to select 20-30 files arbitrarily to e.g. copy them to the new directory. With cp/ls, it takes much more time.