Are moons worse now?

First of all I don't claim to know it all and it might very well be that I miss something fundamental, but...

To me, it seems like moons are now just worse than before. Before mainnet, we could earn them, sell them, buy them, trade them, tip them, use them on every service/wallet/etc that supported testnet. Now we can still do all of those things... But literally everything requires us to pay gas fees.

How is that better than before? I guess it's nice to have the "mainnet prestige"... but in every practical sense it's exactly the same plus gas fees.

What am I missing? What benefits does mainnet actually have?