I'm not especially a fan of IDA, but I don't do much of this work anymore and haven't had a reason to catch up. IDA definitely wouldn't be the first tool I'd reach for in 2019.

I'm not really a fan either, but it's somewhat better and this makes people seem to like to pass around IDBs…

It's the de facto standard and the program you can assume everyone is already using, plus the fact that a lot of tooling relies on IDA (in part because, for a long time, it was the only game in town) for analysis and function recovery. I don't know if that really makes it "better".

I got out of this stuff before decompilation became a mainstream feature, so it might be a big deal that Ghidra has a strong decompiler.

Yeah, that's basically it. Most other tools either lack a decompiler or have a somewhat poorer one.