The key advantages of lasers over other light sources are:
One cool thing about lasers is that they rely on one specific atomic energy level transition to produce light. This is why they are able to to be so monchromatic. Compare this to:
  • incandescent bulbs: wide black-body radiation spectrum
  • LED: has a wider spectrum fundamentally related to an energy distribution, related: Why aren't LEDs monochromatic
  • TODO think a bit about fluorescent lamps. These also rely on atomic energy transitions, but many of them are present at once, which makes the spectrum very noisy. But would individual lines be very narrow?
As such, lasers manage to largely overcome "temperature distribution-like" effects that create wider wave spectrum
Video 1.
Crazy difference between 5W laser and 5W LED by Brainiac75
. Source. Baseic but good. Uses a laser photometer.
It emits a very narrow range of frequencies (small linewidth), which for many purposes can be considered a single frequency.
It does however have a small range of frequencies. The smaller the range, the better the laser quality.
electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/477264/spectrum-of-leds claims cheap LEDs have 20 nm width at 50% from peak, and cheap lasers can be 1 nm or much less
You could put an LED in a cavity with a thin long hole but then, most rays, which are not aligned with the hole, will just bounce inside forever producing heat.
So you would have a very hot device, and very little efficiency on the light output. This heat might also behave like a black-body radiation source, so you would not have a single frequency.
The beauty of lasers is the laser cavity (two parallel mirrors around the medium) selects parallel motion preferentially, see e.g.: youtu.be/_JOchLyNO_w?t=832 from Video "How Lasers Work by Scientized (2017)"

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