Spectral editing that removes a cough without touching the sentence around it. Superb at spoken word, and you rent it for as long as you use it.
Audition is the descendant of Cool Edit Pro, and it has spent two decades becoming the tool that radio stations, podcast producers and video editors reach for when audio needs rescuing rather than merely recording. If your problem is "this interview has a fridge hum, a door slam and one participant who is too quiet", Audition solves it faster and more convincingly than anything else on this list.
The cost model is the argument against it. It is subscription only, billed monthly or annually, either as a single app or as part of Creative Cloud. Stop paying and you stop editing. For a professional billing clients that is an ordinary business expense; for a hobbyist it is the reason REAPER exists. Check Adobe's current pricing before committing, because it changes, and there are education and bundle rates.
Waveform view is a destructive single-file editor, like Audacity or Ocenaudio but considerably more powerful. Multitrack view is a non-destructive session with tracks, buses, effect racks and automation. You move between them constantly, editing a clip properly in Waveform then dropping it back into the session, and the round trip is seamless in a way that bolted-together free tools never quite manage.
Audition draws your audio as a spectrogram, frequency against time, and lets you select regions of it with a lasso or a brush. A cough sitting under a word appears as a bright smear; select just that smear and heal it, and the word underneath survives intact. A filter cannot do this, because a filter removes a frequency band from the whole file. Spectral repair removes a shape.
Once you have used it on a ruined take you understand why professionals stay subscribed. The same view makes electrical hum, hard drive whine and a phone notification in the background trivially findable.
Recording itself is competent and unremarkable: multitrack input assignment, punch and roll for voice-over artists re-reading a flubbed line, monitoring with effects, ASIO support on Windows. It is not why you buy it. You buy it for what happens after the recording exists.
It is heavy: a large install, a slow first launch, and a machine-load that older laptops feel. It is Windows and macOS only. Its music-production side is thin compared to a real music DAW: there is no MIDI sequencing worth the name, so composers should look elsewhere. And Creative Cloud brings the usual background processes and account requirements that some people actively dislike.
The right tool if audio repair is part of your job and the subscription is a business cost. Spectral editing and the Essential Sound panel save hours on difficult material, and for anyone already living in Premiere Pro the integration settles the argument on its own.
For everyone else the honest advice is to try Audacity first and only move up when you hit a wall you can name. If it is the price rather than the capability that stops you, REAPER covers most of the same ground for a one-off fee.