It's also probably one of the easiest services to deploy and manage; often a one-liner.
Plus like you said, swiss army knife. It has so many uses. It's inevitable my stack will include a redis at some point, and my reaction is almost always "I should have just started with redis in the first place."
Is redis prone to golden hammer syndrome? Of course. But as long as you aren't too ridiculous, I've found you can stretch it pretty far.