I've become so much more productive in my hobby programming projects, because it lets me skip over the tedious parts that suck the life out of me (boilerplate, figuring out library dependencies, etc), and I can focus on the parts that are actually interesting like experimenting with different solutions, iterating and learning new things.

It also lets me explore other libraries and languages without having to invest too much time and effort before knowing if it's right for what I want to do. I know that if I want to continue in a different direction, I haven't wasted tons of time/effort and getting started in the new direction will be much less effortful and time consuming.