I know the following outline cannot be valid across time and space, but it offers a certainly interesting insight on the relationship between the hopped beer and commercialization of late medieval north-western European society.
Tl; dr: Hopped beer had more favorable traits as the trading ware for medieval merchants than other beer/ ale with other additives.
Hops are natural resistant to germs, thus medieval merchants could transfer hopped in the barrel without worrying about degeneration for month. This durability alone would be enough to make hopped beer good export ware, but it also had interesting side effects: Also as for cost-wise, hopped beer was superior to other herb-added beer. The reason is as following: hopped beer, due to its durability, did not require much raw materials, i.e. malt to get enough high percentage of ethanol as other beers/ ales like gruit beer. Here the preservative efficiency of the hop could be functioned as a substitute of ethanol ingredient to some extent. Thus, the hopped beer could be not only made with less cost, but also with higher durability. Was it ideal for the commercial product in pre-modern period?
This technical innovation as well as the diffusion of larger scale commercial beer production firstly occurred in the 14th century Holland, and gradually also spread in England and other region of North-Western Europe like Hanseatic cities by the end of the Middle Ages.
In course of the 14th century, some Hollandic towns had already changed the name of the tax imposed on the beer brewing from gruitgeld (gruit-tax) to hop(pe)geld (hop-tax), and Delft (famous for its pottery industry) in Holland was the first town that also collected a tax on the hop itself in 1340 (Unger 2004: 78-82).
Among the Hanseatic cities, Hamburg was probably the town that got benefit from this social-economic trend the most: In 1376, ca. 43% of the registered craftsmen in Hamburg were beer brewers (Wubs-Mrozewicz 2005: 155). About the third of the total product of beer in Hamburg in the Later Middle Age is said to have exported, mainly to Holland via Amsterdam. Lübeck also had 174 Brauhäuser (breweries) in 1407, so they also could export quite an amount of the produced beer there around the Northern Seas. I also saw Rostock and Wismar in northern Germany was the exporter of beer to the 16th century Scandinavian cities like Bergen in Norway.
It is also worth noting, however. that this transition from ale/ non-hopped beer to the hopped beer had not been completed even within NW Europe by the end of the Middle Age. Some local customers criticized this new, 'industrialized' drink, and we can see some of such grudges from late medieval England. To give an example, a 16th century English text states the hopped beer made the man fat, and mocks the obesity of the Dutchmen (Wubs-Mrozewicz 2005: 156).
It was not until about the middle of the 16th century [after the beginning of the Reformation] that the local production of the hopped beer became widespread in England, but this kind of prejudice against the hopped beer rather swiftly disappeared also from England once the local production got popular.
References:
(Edited): fixes typos.
Another important thing to keep in mind is that before hops ale did not universally have spices or herbs in it. Gruit (a mix of herbs and spices) was certainly a thing and very common areas (specifically what's now Belgium, the Netherlands and adjacent parts of Germany) but a lot of that was expensive and hard to grow or had to be imported. Price was further increased by there often being a church monopoly on gruit sales.
In England ale generally did not have any sort of herb or spice in it at all before the advent of hops. Some herbs like sweet gale were certainly used but they were very much the minority. After hops came in "ale" generally referred to old-style unhopped beer and "beer" (although this distinction was never absolute, you had people putting small amounts of hops into the ale often in violation of efforts by government to keep ale and beer distinct for revenue purposes) usually referred to continental-style hopped beer. It took centuries for this linguistic distinction to break down until you got ale defined as a kind of beer. Meanwhile in many places such as Scandinavia the main flavoring old traditional ale would come from the spruce boughs used to strain the malt out of after mashing.
So while various herbs and spices were used, in many many many areas hops were replacing ale with no herbs or spices at all rather than replacing various older herbs and spices (which sometimes continued to be used after the introduction of hops).
As far as why hops were so popular well hops was simply cheaper than any other alternative with similar anti-bacteria properties that didn't also kill the yeast. However, hops were still expensive since hops plants (until modern advances in breeding and cultivation) were extremely prone to downy mildew which often lead to whole crops being lost. People could and did store hops from one year to the next in case the next harvest failed but without modern storage techniques the potency of old hops were often quite low. This caused all kinds of problems but hops were still worth it since they did a good job of keeping bacteria out without hurting the yeast.
For flavor goes a lot of people did complain about the taste of hops but brewers liked using them too much so they kept on using them anyway and people got used to them eventually.
Sources:
Bennett, J., Ale, Beer, and Brewsters in England (Women's work in a Changing World, 1300--1600), 1996 Oxford University Press, New York
Markham, G., The English Housewife, Best, M. ed., 1986 McGill-Queen's Press. (originally published 1615, 1623, and 1631.), Kingston
Breverton, Terry The Tudor Kitchen: What the Tudors Ate & Drank 2018 Amberley Publishing, Stroud
Specifically the quotes about old recipes contained in those sources from various contemporary writers.