Mercator can be a very useful map. Angles are not distorted. It's also very good at low distortion at small scales. As you zoom in on a point, the area distortion diminishes. Once your area of interest is around 300km wide, the area distortion is only about one part in one thousand. It converges very quickly on a "true" representation of the earth.
Mercator's ubiquity isn't due to people who "aren't into maps" but rather because its strengths are really powerful in many use cases. Imagine the confusing situation if, in your favorite Maps app, North weren't always directly up, intersections met at wrong angles, and square buildings didn't always look square.
Those strengths being in navigation: straight lines in Mercator maps correspond to a constant bearing in the real world, which is really handy when your ship needs to cross thousands of kilometers of ocean.
