I like to think about it in terms of what the code for managing a shopping looks like.

Without Temporal, you store the state of the cart in the DB, load it when the app interacts with your backend, run some business logic and serialize state back into the DB.

With Temporal, first of all, there's no DB. The entire flow is modeled in a single piece of code. Your Workflow can listen to user signals to update the cart, queries to get the cart state, schedule durable timers to remind a user that their cart is abandoned after days and months.