Moderators can do almost anything without peer review, that is, unilaterally; we can close stuff with one vote, we can edit things without approval, et cetera. This is particularly useful for tag handling, as we can create synonyms without needing to have a certain rep in the tag or get it approved.

There are also things regular users can't do at all, like edit close reasons, certain parts of the help center or election text, and redact edits. Some of those things do require approval from other moderators.

Most importantly, we can see a lot more information about users which is useful for tracking down offenders and policing certain behavior, and can suspend/warn users. We can also lock questions.

You could spend all day on the site doing moderator stuff, but most people don't. I've handled about 22 flags in the last month, for example. Most of my activity is concentrated on short, five-to-ten minute bursts of time through the day going through the flag backlog.

That's probably because nothing in particular is going on right now, though. During the times we were conducting a big project, like tag reworks, I can find myself spending most of my free time on it.

I think we work well as a team, both the GDSE moderators and the rest of the SE mods in general. There is a private chat for the GDSE moderators that we use to coordinate when we need to (although there hasn't been anything happening that seriously warranted that in a while, except coordination of the election).

And all of the SE mods are usually willing to help explain some aspect of the job to a new moderator who has questions. I would expect the new moderators to have questions to ask during their first few days but eventually, unless something is going on, we mostly handle the site flags and minor issues independently.