The biggest advantage for having a good AAC encoder isn't efficiency, it's that for nearly the past 2 decades the de facto standard for live streamed video has been RTMP with H.264 video and AAC audio. There is basically no support for any other codecs. If you want to send a video stream to Youtube or Twitch, you will be sending H.264 and AAC. If you want an idea of how ubiquitous this is, I just checked in OBS and it will not even let you select different video and audio codecs in streaming mode, it just (correctly) assumes that anybody who's streaming will be streaming H.264 and AAC.
Plus, at 96+ kbps (assuming an Apple-quality AAC-LC encoder) Opus loses its quality advantage. So at higher bitrates, the benefit of choosing Opus is that encoders/decoders are royalty-free.
Also the fact that hardware-accelerated AAC and even full AAC offload is ubiquitous in modern-ish hardware. I think my rice cooker can play AAC audio
No one really offloads AAC, apart from Apple. Opus can be decoded on very cheap microcontrollers entirely in software using the reference library.
Sample accurate editing is with AAC is a pain though. Especially if you also have video, because frame rates are usually incompatible.
If you want flexibility without fully transcoding both audio and video, Opus is your friend
Opus is your friend as long as the software you’re using supports it—besides, Apple’s AAC-LC can beat out Opus in low bitrates scenarios.
Whether you like it or not, AAC is still the standard.