It's handy for situations where you have inexperienced people needing to flash microcontrollers. Meshtastic is a great example, it's meant for a wide variety of users from people that can actually write code to people that have only maybe heard of a raspberry pi in passing. You buy a transceiver on Amazon, go to the meshtastic website, plug in the transceiver, and hit "flash". Also, I don't want to have to download yet another custom Arduino IDE. I don't need to actually modify the running code, I just want the binary on the device so I can move on with playing with it.