The main advantage of hexagonal spherical tiling systems is that they are roughly equal area at a given resolution. This makes them particularly suitable for generating visualizable aggregates when you primarily care about spatial distribution rather than specific boundaries (like borders).
The main disadvantage of non-congruent tiling systems like H3 is poor scalability and performance when running analytical computations. In most cases you wouldn't want to shard your underlying data this way even if this is how you want to visualize it.
It is easy to get the best of both worlds. You can shard data models as 3-space spherical embeddings (efficient for large-scale analytic computation) and convert query results to an H3 tiling at wire speed on demand.
It is a common misconception that h3 is equal area. At any resolution level the cell size varies by a factor of 2, which is (roughly) the same as S2.
See the following visualizations for an illustration:
https://a5geo.org/examples/area
https://a5geo.org/examples/airbnb