At this point if I were to have any type of project of my own, I wouldn't really care about any exchanges at all, I would just go to dex route and swap route and that would be enough for me. Just be listed at uniswap and all the things similar to it, that way people could provide liquidity as well, and it would look like there is a huge amount of market for the project I created and nothing more, with the money I have I could provide liquidity myself and that would allow me to make some profit while also making my coin look bigger, that is a great deal.

Obviously that would require a bit more technical skill before you can create such a product and a lot of marketing to get it heard, but at the end of the day I would rather do that over trying to get attention from binance or similar level exchanges to get listed and beg them for attention to survive.

Traders like binance because of it's friendly interface. high exchange volume, lots giveaways and free promotions rewards. and many other reasons.
In my first post. I stated that I prefer DEX exchanges over CEX. but if I had to choose a CEX exchange I would go with Binance. another cool feature of Binance is it allows you to trade, deposit and widhraw maximum 2 BTC daily without doing any KYC.
so if you are a small trader and also don't want to disclose your personal documents binance is best option for you.

There is no exchange in the space currently whether CEX or DEX that compare to Binance, so any projects should strive to be listed on Binance. A project with strong community  and good incentive to list on Uniswap, another exchange I feel is  CoinBase.

1. Binance
2. Uniswap
3. CoinBase

If your currency is well programmed and has a future, all platforms will scramble to list it without taking any fees from you, but you need the currency to be well programmed and solve a real problem in an innovative way.

Other than that, you need to pay a lot of money in marketing first and then for the listing fees, if you do not have enough cash, you will not be able to keep the price of your currency high (continuous and increasing demand) and thus it will die over time.

I will go Centralized exchanges, DEX like balancer and uniswap are good but still not preferred to CEX for me, also DEX are now more dangerous for newbies than CEX because cloned tokens can get listed on DEX without anyone investigating on the tokens,

1. Bithumb
2. Bkex
3. Coinone

Also it's not that good to go straight on top exchanges first, it should come later, I have my reasons for that