I'm paid once every two weeks, bi-weekly (although I always forget if it's bi-weekly or semi-weekly...), but for the most part annual salary is the thing that is more reliable for me go to go on, because bi-weekly pay can change in small ways over a calendar year, and at least in my company we also get bonuses occassionally so there are periods where I get paid more often than bi-weekly.
26 pay periods a year + 4 annual bonuses (once/quarter), so I'm technically paid about 30x/year by my primary employer. I do a small amount of freelance these days, very little, so that's another small check occassionally... I used to do a lot more freelance.
So I think annual, for me and most people I know, is the best comparison. Also for lines of work that pay overtime, or seasonal pay, or bonuses, etc, annual usually makes the most sense as a point of comparison. Like if you work in sales you might get a regular weekly/biweekly/monthly check, but you're primarily compensated by commission on a sale. If you work in service like the food services industry, if you work Thurs->Sun you'll usually make more than if you worm Mon->Wed, and depending on how shifts are split out, and the seasonality of the industry, evening it out over the whole year can make sense. Then there's some industries like retail where November and December are by far the biggest sales months, and compensation can be dependent on those longer hours, so your February pay might be a fraction of what your December pay is.
Getting paid monthly sucks. That's a full 30 days that they've had your labor before you get paid for it. That money could have been earning you more money in the meantime. Instead, the company is earning interest for those 30 days on your salary/labor.
In higher ed I used to get paid monthly, and honestly I didn't mind it because all of my bills are monthly bills, from rent to phone to heat to basically everything, and so it was easy to do a budget when I was younger.
I switched companies to semi-monthly or whatever it is, basically paid twice a month, 24 pay periods, which I liked for the same reasons and because pay always came on the same days every month... the 12th and the 26th or something like that. Then we switched to bi-weekly, 26 pay periods, and that was fine, but I like it less than semi-monthly because it's nominally harder to budget if you're living paycheck to paycheck, because two months a year you get 3 paychecks, and your pay days are always shifting by 2-3 days a month.
At my monthly company they also paid out for the forthcoming month, like when I started I started on the 7th or something, and we got paid on the 15th, and so I got paid for ~5 weeks of work with that first paycheck, 1 week from the previous month, and then forward for the next month. Of course when I left ~6 years later it all evened out.
Higher ed did monthly playments because they live in the stone age of technology, had like 1 or 2 people who managed payroll for the whole campus, and it was just simpler.
