The point of 5G is to allow carriers to serve more data with the same amount of spectrum. Usually that leads to consumer benefits in the form of a cheaper rate per megabyte. That's basically it.
Guess who pays?
In most of those other use cases, the carrier serves as basically a big dumb pipe.
I've been working in the IoT space for some time and there's now a real shift into these technologies for large scale telemetry deployments like you described. The shutdown of 2G networks across the world have ruled out a lot of the cheaper modems.
There are other benefits, such as enabling a larger set of solutions to be battery powered and for an increased lifespan.
High density, sparse traffic solutions like you described are often termed as mMTC (Massive Machine Type Communications). The main benefits to 5G in these regards focus on the mobile network and their ability to manage a higher volume of subscribers and therefore lower their costs to the end customer.
Parts of the 5GC specifications such as URLLC (Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency Communication) allow for far more safety critical solutions to be back-hauled over a mobile network. Autonomous driving, critical industrial control systems and remote surgery solutions are some I've seen.
Even standalone 5G networks are now specified, they use unlicensed spectrum and give you the freedom to not even include a carrier in the equation at all.