It's interesting how this feels like a big deal; when I learned of this yesterday, I almost forgot that there have been almost 30 missions to Mars (which I assume is much harder and more expensive) in the years since the last moon landing.
There's probably valuable stuff on the moon and even if not, it's learning a load of things about going further afield. Lots of science fiction about the asteroid belt beyond mars.
While just landing on the moon is definitely much simpler than a Mars mission, this lander is a part of the Artemis program; it's one of the first steps towards developing the Artemis base camp on the moon.
Manned space missions are significantly more expensive (and complicated) than robotic missions. (Otherwise, we'd be sending a lot more people into space.)
Let's do a little bit of back-of-the-envelope Googling:
From https://www.planetary.org/space-policy/cost-of-apollo
> The United States spent $25.8 billion on Project Apollo between 1960 and 1973, or approximately $257 billion when adjusted for inflation to 2020 dollars.
From https://www.planetary.org/space-policy/cost-of-the-mars-expl....
> The Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission cost $1.08 billion. Of that amount, $744 million was spent on spacecraft development and launch; $335.8 million was spent on 15 years of mission operations.
So it looks like "manned" space missions cost at least 100x the cost of sending a robot.
Mars is orders of magnitude harder to land on because of its atmosphere, stronger gravity, and the need to keep your robot healthy on the long trip over.