I run it across four sites and it is the only source that tells me what Google actually did, rather than what a third party tool inferred. Two parts earn that on their own.
The URL Inspection API is the accurate read and the Pages report is not. Coverage lags by days, so acting on it alone means chasing problems that already resolved and missing ones that have not. Inspection answers per URL, now. Once my checks moved onto it the numbers stopped disagreeing with reality.
The API is also what makes it usable at volume. I pull a daily indexing latency series across 219 URLs, which is a question no screen in the product will answer for you, but the data is sitting there once you go through the API instead of the dashboard.
