Practically, it seems that it doesn’t have any advantage over a normal bike?
It has no advantage. But it is a challenge, off-road unicycling even more so. What’s the advantage of riding rounds a trail centre, only to end up where you started? You could have just stood still for two hours and achieved the same effect for no money and for no expenditure of energy.
On the subject of this thread, I have found that while young women will generally at least smile at me, older women appear to find the whole concept of a unicycle so threatening to their world view that they would rather pretend that I and my unicycle don’t exist. Men’s reactions do seem to follow the pattern suggested in the article.