There's several benefits we had in mind when building this (after using self-hosted Renovate ourselves):
k8s-native approach: It uses CRDs, so that Renovate configs are Kubernetes resources. You can manage them more easily/granular with Argo/Flux/kubectl as part of existing workflows instead of a Cronjob.
Job isolation: The operator spawns individual jobs per repo instead of one run. If a repo is stuck it doesn't block everything else.
Webhook support: repos get updated immediately, not just on the next cron cycle.
Visibility: There's a light-weight, built-in UI showing repos, job status, and progress.<p>There's more on the Github repo, we added a full list of features and benefits to the readme.<p>Of course, in the end it comes down to individual preferences :) Not saying one way is better than the other. We just felt that for us, the operator-based approach would work better and we're happy if the project is benefitial for others as well!