It's a native macOS app, so it starts instantly. I use it for everything – from writing articles to comments/messages, where I care a bit more about not making typos or accidentally sending before proofreading.
Notes is clumsy – I never can find what I want there. With folders, pinned notes, named notes, synced/unsynced etc, it's just a mess.
Drafts is just a super-reliable and fast editor that is better than any other textbox/editor. So I mostly use it for copy pasting. Even use it for HN comments that are longer than 10 lines.
That said, I have returned to it and am abandoning Drafts. Turns out that, once you have a substantial amount of stuff, finding stuff is just as bad as Notes and I do not actually use the automation.
Also, I want Rich Text, too. I believe in plain text but, in the end, I cannot live without being able to easily set text to be bold, colored or large so that I can see the important parts. Still, I am mad at Notes for not supporting Markdown because I do README and such often.
Since you're back to Notes, you might be interested to know that you can now scope searches in a bunch ways — folders, Smart Folder, tags, kind (i.e. limit to notes with checklists), date range, etc. You can even search "notes created last year" to see all of your notes created last year, etc. https://support.apple.com/en-au/guide/notes/not18ab658ed/mac
It is my view that the current market has coerced programmers to have free versions even though programmers cannot buy food or pay mortgages with free versions.
I consider it unethical to gain a benefit in my daily life without giving something in return. $20/year is almost too little.