1. It has decent backwards compatibility (code i wrote even 20 years ago compiles either out of the box or with very minimal change - e.g. if you used strings as byte buffers or if you relied on some esoteric RTTI implementation details you may need to change some things but the changes are quick and trivial).
2. Lazarus is a fast and responsive IDE with RAD functionality for making GUIs (and other stuff, e.g. i haven't used it myself much but you can do things like configure visually via the IDE how a webapp will respond to various URLs) and FCL and LCL provide a rich frameworks for desktop applications.
3. The compiler is relatively fast. Delphi's compiler (at least the classic one) is much faster but compared to -e.g.- current C++ compilers, FPC is much faster (it takes less than a minute to compile Lazarus itself and AFAIK the codebase is more than a million lines of code - there is 2 million lines of code in the repo but you don't compile everything).