but it's not really useful to describe reality.

This is just not true.

What topology does for people practically, is it allows them to do a rough kind of geometric reasoning in a wide variety of cases. Further, the geometric notions defined via topology subsume many of the more intuitive notions you might already know of from the number line or the plane.

For example, continuity of functions, convergence of sequences, interiors and boundaries of sets, connectedness and many other things are inherently topological notions that any person who has taken a typical calculus sequence should have some intuitive idea of.

One of the biggest difference between actual pure topology and analysis is that analysis is just done in the context of really nice types of topological spaces called metric spaces in which notions of distance are available.

Any time people are using results of calculus in the sciences, under the hood they are using details about topology on R^n.