I only use BASIC with line numbers, mostly GW-BASIC and pcbasic. Without numbers it just feels like Lua or python or any other scripting language, but worse? The line numbers BASICs come with their own almost-REPL (IDE?) that I find quite nice (or at least fun) to work in. Maybe mostly nostalgia, but it is the only reason for me to use BASIC at all. I have some basic-mode installed to edit BASIC code in emacs, but I only rarely edit the code outside of its natural built-in line-editor.
There were some advantages. The more advanced BASICs gave you functions / subroutines so you didn't have to mess around with using global variables to pass arguments to a "gosub".