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Notes -
There are a few different things going on with Ulysses that contribute to why it's achieved such an exalted status.
On a "macro", conceptual level: you can think of it as an illustration of Clement Greenberg's thesis of the "flatness of the canvas", just applied to literature rather than painting. One of the dominant philosophical themes in early 20th century art was the "self-consciousness" of the art object: the work of art taking its own formal construction as its subject matter and embracing its nature as an object of artifice, rather than presenting itself as a transparent representation of an external subject matter (in the way that e.g. classical representational painting aims to be a transparent window to a scene depicting physical objects in 3D space). Abstract painting forced the viewer to consciously acknowledge the fact that they were looking at paint on a flat canvas. Ulysses does something similar with words, it embraces the "textuality of the text": treating words as a pliable and fluid medium that don't necessarily have to be constrained by the traditional logic of representation. It plays with this concept in a bunch of different ways without just falling apart into a string of random words. But it also pushed stream-of-consciousness writing to its limits and foregrounded the internal psychological states of its characters in a way that no novel had ever really done before. And it's also replete with explicit and not-so-explicit references to the Western literary canon, like a puzzle to be decoded. Basically it's operating on all these different levels at once and still managing to weave it all into a coherent whole.
On a "micro", technical level: it's kind of just obviously a work of intense and surpassing beauty, Joyce was unmatched as a prose stylist:
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