The main issue is (and always has been, in my opinion) that "Standard" pascal sucks in that it doesn't have standard libraries, and thus all of them were just a little too different from each other.

Delphi (and Lazarus/Free Pascal) have a largely compatible and sane set of libraries that include quite sane string handling (you never allocate or deallocate them, the have length, and can contain nulls without issue)

The latest versions of things include generics, so you can make lists, trees, etc of your defined record type with little to no trouble.

Separate compilation of Units means that I almost never wait for a compile... it is always sub-second from hitting F9, to seeing the thing run.

The two-way tools to edit forms are one of the most productive I've ever seen. Borland C++ built a lot of boilerplate to make up for the C++ impedance match with their VCL libraries, that you couldn't tinker with, or things broke. Delphi/Lazarus don't have that issue.

Lazarus doesn't support GIT integration directly, yet, as far as I know. If you are doing personal projects, there's no reason not to use it.