(I have no expertise in biology, spitballing): One other benefit of sexual reproduction is that you could get a stable equilibrium with diverse phenotypes. Imagine that giraffes eat from Acacia trees and Baobab shrubs. You need to be tall to reach the Acacia trees and short to reach the Baobab bushes. An asexual organism would have to split into two niches, one that grows tall to each Acacia and one that is short to eat Baobab (maybe even two different species). A sexual organism could have a gene with X and Y types where if your alleles match (XX or YY) you're tall, and otherwise short. If the less common of {tall,short} is more fit, then you'll have an equilibrium where X and Y alleles are equally common in the population. You have to have a story for why this is better than two separate species, one to eat Baobab and one to eat Acacia. Maybe cooperation is easier among organisms that can till reproduce sexually instead of being symbiotic but separate species? Maybe it's as simple as staying the a unified species leading to greater genetic diversity.
I wish I’d asked more explicitly to previous employers: What regulations do we reinterpret because they’re horrible written and everyone ignores them? What parts of our business do we sugarcoat to customers? To investors? I wish the answer to these questions was “we follow all regulations exactly, and give customers and investors the most accurate possible picture of our business,” and I would love to try to run my own business that way (especially the part about giving customers very honest answers), but this hasn’t empirically been the case anywhere I’ve worked.
Put another way: most people are meta-honest, even though they’ve never heard of the term. But they’ll never tell you in which situations they think lying is OK unless you ask. You should ask.