If you are building an EVM-compatible chain and can afford an Etherscan deployment, pay for it. The UX is well-understood by most chain users which makes the experience of interacting with a new chain substantially better. Etherscan also comes with a barebone, yet familiar way of interacting with any verified contract. It’s really useful for easily checking storage variable values, and for interacting with contracts (e.g. NFT mints). Don’t get me wrong, Etherscan comes with its own problems (e.g. why are txs in a block displayed in reverse order??), but I think the UX lindyness outweighs that.

The main counterpoint I hear from folks is that an Etherscan deployment is expensive, which is very fair and understanably hard to justify. I expect that a credible competitor will eventually emerge which will force Etherscan to bring prices down. It’s also not clear how much tech debt Etherscan has which has downstream effects — harder to spin up new deployments due to customizations which requires higher costs to justify.