The Ugarits and Canaanites were Ba'als area. Babylonians chiefly Marduk and Ishtar.

As I understand, the Babylonians predominantly worshiped Bel and Nebo, not Ba'al. That was the Cannanites.

As for why Ba'al and not Yahweh was worshiped by the jews/isralites, that appears to be a difficult theological question that is well outside my knowledge. At the time when they were rival gods, Ba'al and Yahweh were both considered fairly similar, since both were warrior gods, and Ba'al was also a god of sea storms, and Yahweh was a god of thunderstorms.

I guess the way I would look at it is: which god actually helped devotees more? If it's true that Ba'al's rituals involved human sacrifice of children, where as Yahweh had sacrifice of some animals, that might be a good indicator of which cult would have had more pathological tendencies. The modern concept of God is that of a father figure. If any of that goes back to the original Yahweh that was competing with Ba'al, then you have two very similar gods, but one is a fatherly god, where the other sacrifices children. We only need to look around to see how pathological a fatherless society is. So, the society that will have better outcomes for it's people would be a society that worships a father figure, rather than one that demands child sacrifice.