It was a loooong time ago that I first installed TubeBuddy. Initially I learned about TubeBuddy through Roberto's videos where he did sponsored channel review videos way back around 2016/2017.
YouTube had horrible comment management back then, so using TubeBuddy was the ONLY way for me to be able to sort between comments I'd replied to, and comments not yet replied. Doing it natively via YouTube was such a time waste, so TubeBuddy really helped me find comments I might have missed, without having to sort through hundreds of replied to comments.
To this day, you can still use TubeBuddy in partnership with YouTube's new comment sorting (brought in at the end of 2019) so you can sort to find replies, to your replies, which YouTube still doesn't have a sorting options for. Always invaluable.
The other benifit in the early days for me, was to see how my tags were ranking thanks to the green indication.
Oh, and fun fact... back in 2016 YouTube didn't have a character indicator to tell you how many characters you'd used for the tags. Without TubeBuddy installed, the only way to know was to guess, or get hit with "too many characters" and you just had guess how many extra tags were taking up the character limit. TubeBuddy actually showed you a character indicator... that saved more time than you'd think.
The replace all features to help add in or remove links from descriptions has always been amazing.
People are always so obsessed with growth, not realising there's so many MANAGEMENT tools to just make life easier. It's not always about how to rank the highest, sometimes it's just about making replying easier. People forget to praise the small things in life.