Being able to have the same keyring password as the user’s login one means that, whilst it’s not secure “on the console” in gnome, it is slightly more secure if you ssh in (because you still need the user’s password & the same for keyring, because this only works in gnome).

The keyring doesn’t make your computer safer per-se – in some ways it does the opposite (as you only need one password/passphrase to get access to lots of accounts). You could argue that it makes stuff safer because you can then choose a difficult password/passphrase for other accounts (like banking websites, wifi SSIDs etc) and not have to remember them because you just need your master password/passphrase to unlock the keyring.

The thing to be wary of about using a keyring is that if something happens to it (eg it gets deleted or the computer crashes unrecoverably or you carry out a new install) then you lose access to those account credentials (username/password). This means you either need to backup regularly, and/or take a copy of the keyring file any time you change it (eg to USB stick), and/or keep a copy of passwords elsewhere (eg a password manager like keepass). This is the same for any kind of keyring (eg Firefox one, Thunderbird, etc). This is potentially a common problem, and I’ve tried to help people recover passwords lost in this way (eg tell application to save my username/password to auto-login), so consider issues before doing that

Instead go to Applications>Accessories>Passwords & Encryption Keys
Right click on Passwords:login, set a blank password.

This workaround is not working for me yet, maybe because automatic logon is on? must investigate further….