To me, someone who celebrates a bit more of the spectrum than most: Metal hot. Make food hot.
Non-stick means easier cleanup, but my wife seems to think cast-iron is necessary for certain things (searing a prime rib roast, for example.).
After I figure those out, then I gotta figure out gas vs. electric vs. induction vs infrared…
Sometimes it’s not about metal hot. It’s about how fast or slowly metal gets hot.
A lot of pans are made of stamped sheet metal and quite thin. They get hot very fast, they cool down very fast. With something like a gas burner, you can get a ring of very hot metal where the flames are, and relatively cool metal everywhere else.
Cast iron is thicker, and has a lot more thermal mass. It heats up slower, it evens that heat out, and it hangs onto that heat.
If you were to try to bake cornmeal in a sheet steel pan, it would burn. The metal would get too hot too fast. I prefer cast iron for making rues as well, because you get much more even heat.
Sometimes you do want a lighter pan for concentrated high-heat applications. Woks are designed for cooking over a very hot, very concentrated flame so there’s one very hot spot in the pan, perfect for stir frying.
If you know what you’re doing, you can cook non-stick in a stainless pan, it just takes some oil. Famously, cast iron pans can be “seasoned” or coated with a thin layer of extremely smooth polymerized oil which forms a non-stick surface, like DIY teflon.
So, honestly, I would recommend having a couple of each and choose the pan for the kind of cooking you’re doing.