Even at a 1st level spell, your PCs can quickly become reliant on the spell if they identify every single magical item and learn everything about it. Most DM’s can tire of this and they can use house rules to make the identification of items much harder for the player characters. One rule is that you can use arcana checks to make your best guess about the item. Some parties don’t have a wizard or bard with access to the spell to make the checks, and the Arcana check description itself even says this in the Player’s Handbook: Your Intelligence (Arcana) check measures your ability to recall lore about spells, magic items, eldritch symbols, magical traditions, the planes of existence, and the inhabitants of those planes. So you can lock some higher-level items behind arcana checks rather than the 1st level spell slot. The higher the role, the more information they learn. So rolling a 12 might let them know that the item is magical while rolling a 20 or above lets them know everything about the item, similar to the identity spell. You can also have the character cast the spell at a higher level (and burn a spell slot as a result) if they want to identify a higher-level object. It can also work if they know that an item is magical but want to know its properties or more information about it.