I think npub is cool just because it is stable and part of its characters can be memorized, and it's easy enough to get relays for a pubkey by using hardcoded indexers like relay.nos.social and purplepag.es in most cases, but note1 is completely unjustifiable.

I think npubs should be used in UIs when displaying a user pubkey, but in mentions nprofile is strictly better (apps can even display npubs in mentions after decoding the nprofile). But again, even npubs in mention is not that bad.