"Lowering" (though I've never heard it called that) is also handy in the course of working with formal semantics especially in the case of proofs and other serious reasoning. You can "port" your reasoning from the "lower" construct to the special case of the higher construct.

In general this also translates to simply understanding the semantics of a language. If you can describe something in terms of another concept the listener already has an intuition for, often it makes the new thing easier to understand and learn.

Though it's easy to imagine cases where the "lower" thing is so abstract that it's hard to apprehend in the first place (e.g. "everything is just a closure!").