The tool you use depends on the job at hand
What you’re trying to do dictates whether you should use a telescope or binoculars.
Astronomers have two goals. One: Gather as much light as possible from faint things like galaxies. Two: Create very sharp images, so they can do things like find planets around a distant star.
Most astronomical telescopes start with that first target, acting like light-buckets. They collect millions of times more light than your eye’s tiny pupil, then concentrate it so very faint things can be studied.
To observe something small – like Saturn’s rings, or Jupiter’s clouds – you need a higher-magnification view, perhaps 100X or more. You cannot handhold at magnifications above about 10X; the image gets way too jumpy, so you need a mount, like a tripod.
The tiny field of view means you now also need a way to precisely navigate and track your target as the Earth rotates. Such a mount costs as much as the telescope itself. For most scientific projects, a single point of view is all that is needed, so astronomers overwhelmingly use a telescope.
But for exploring the sky with your own two eyes, the priority is a large field of view. To sweep the magnificent star fields of the Milky Way, or spot the eerie glow surrounding baby stars in the Orion Nebula, binoculars are a great choice.
They are compact, portable and need no mount. They’re a lot cheaper than a decent telescope, too. Get the biggest objective lenses you can (50 mm or more) and keep the magnification low (10X or less).