It's a comfortable, feature-rich interactive shell like bash, but with a relatively clean and small codebase, and the binary is only a third of bash's size. It's also much easier to build from source. Sort of a suckless bash replacement. Not compatible to most bash features though, focus is on POSIX compatibility.
Not sure, but it says it's the most POSIX-compliant shell. Sometimes you have a requirement for a project like "must use a POSIX-compliant shell". If all the other existing shells are only mostly POSIX-compliant, then you'd want Yash.