I find there area few things the budgets and spreadsheets help with from a personal finance perspective:

- Values vs reality: A $3000 candle budget is fine, but if you're spending $10/work-day on candles it might be easier to see when that accumulates and you can compare it against your longer-term aspirational goals. This is especially true for less tangible expenses like subscriptions where it can be difficult to see "I'm spending $3000/year on candles I never burn" from ground level.

- Planning and decision-making: It's easier to make good life decisions (e.g. "should I take $job" or "can I buy $house") if you have an accurate accounting of your life expenses.

Yeah, before we picked up YNAB more than a decade ago we never had issues with $3k of candles disappearing in the budget, but we still struggled to save money.

When we started using YNAB and entering our spending into it, it was like a hockey-stick diagram on our household net worth.

And this isn't even double-entry accounting (which I've adopted for my own personal spending). One thing I'll say is that the way we use YNAB seems different from most other people: we hand-enter every transaction, we don't import it afterwards from the bank. Then we reconcile what we thought we spent vs. what the bank says we spent.

In this way we have to be a bit more intentional about what we're spending money on since there's not some kind of big monthly exercise to make the numbers line up and then a "we'll try to be better next month". Instead it's more like an envelope system where we are tracking budget categories as the month goes by.