Somehow I doubt most Tor users are really just in it for privacy for general browsing, especially since it's so slow and limited. You can get a VPN for that. Unless you're a total privacy purist, there's not much incentive to use Tor unless you're buying drugs/something else illegal or just curious to look around the dark web.

Tor is free with no signup / cc required. This makes a huge difference, especially for younger users. Did for me back then, at least.

Initially it was slow, yes. But totally fine the last few years for normal browsing and reasonable downloads. Speedtest.net, speedtest.googlefiber & fast.com just now gave me 5, 6 & 10Mbps for whatever server in Ghana i got. Only the high ping causes loading times to still be a bit annoying.

But right now the biggest reason not to use Tor for anything "legit" is the many services blocking you, since indeed most current Tor users are not what those services want and the race to the bottom of Tor will continue, if we haven't reached it already.

Tor is slow if you're used to browse with a 50 MB internet connection speed.

My own connection doesn't go over 1.6MB download speed, and only if the weather is clear and I have the wind in the back.

You can now achieve a 500KB or more speed in most Tor connection, which is enough to have a confortable browsing experience, imo.

The real downside is the google captcha, which happens sometimes to even denie you to solve a captcha in the first place for web pages where there is no user input.