It offers anonymized payments with low fees. Like Bitcoin but without the chain being visible to anybody.
Unlike with regular payments, the transactions are anonymous, irreversible, and requires no KYC. Most crypto are not fully anonymous. Beware other privacy coins based on zksnarks since their creators are generally anti-anonymity (in the sense they don’t want their tokens to be used in illicit transactions and have pledged to make that harder - this defeats the entire purpose of a privacy coin, and any solution to this would reduce privacy).
While monero is not fully anonymous under 100% of cases - it’s possible to do something to allow transactions to be linked back, such as using the same receiving and sending sub addresses multiple times for transactions - it’s pretty dang good. It’s pretty close to being digital cash. And the fees are pretty low (last I checked maybe $0.10?), which is more or less a permanent feature because it has dynamic block sizes.
BTW, for any blockchain, it’s a good thing for ex fees to be non-zero. Otherwise there is no cost to “spamming” the blockchain which congests the network and increases the size of the chain (potentially making it harder to host).
It is unfortunately based on POW, but on the bright side it uses an asic resistant CPU-based algorithm to prevent centralization.