IPA is also amazingly useful if you want to learn another language or even just learn to say someone's name correctly.
Having a notation for sounds helps you to understand and speak foreign languages, because you can think of what someone is saying in IPA and not in some flawed English transcription.
It definitely took me longer than an hour to learn IPA, but aside from that, definitely. I have an amateur interest in linguistics so I picked it up through reading Wikipedia articles on obscure languages, I would say I use it at least once a week.
Very helpful when learning languages that have sounds that aren't in a language you already speak, because your brain tends to map those sounds to similar sounds you already know.
Like how English speakers can't distinguish between French [u] and [ou] (/y/ and /u/ in IPA). Even if you can't hear it you can read about how to articulate it.
Also a little life hack that has served me well for over ten years, and rarely fails me: Wikipedia’s disambiguation page for those hard to Google acronyms. The format will be something like:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPA_(disambiguation)
If there’s a long list, generally it will be organized by context.
Having a notation for sounds helps you to understand and speak foreign languages, because you can think of what someone is saying in IPA and not in some flawed English transcription.