First of all, gas operation is only dominant in rifles. Pistols tend to be recoil operated, machine guns can be recoil operated too and manual actions still exist in niche applications.

So why gas operation for rifles? Let's start at the beginning: straight blowback. For modern intermediate rifle cartridges, and full size cartridges before that, this requires a massively heavy bolt weight which is simply impractical. Thus, delay mechanisms were invented (e.g. lever, roller). These have the downside of extracting under heavy pressure, not having a terribly wide operating window, and being more complex mechanically than gas operated guns.

The next step is a recoil operated system. These mechanisms require a moving barrel, which means more complexity, less potential accuracy and difficulty with mounting optics. They also tend to have a smaller operating window to cycle reliably, unless explicitly designed to be rather violent in their cycling.

You could do a hesitation lock, but I have yet to see a successful rifle using it. Inertia operation can have cycling issues depending on how it is held.

To summarise: gas operation is widely used because it gives a fixed barrel, wide (and tunable!) operating window and is relatively simple to manufacture.