At present , Definitely higher = better
Even if the audio signals are resampled , you can benefit from higher sample rate.
Because the recording devices we use now are not good enough.
The music is Low-fi indeed , not hi-fi.
Though a supporter of hirez, I don’t agree that simply upsampling on playback prior to the DAC does a whole lot. Don’t a lot of DACs already do that internally anyway? And, it does nothing in itself for filter artifacts already encoded in the music signal from a-d in the recording process. So, I believe that the small audible sonic benefits of hirez really need a hirez recording/playback chain in order to have a chance of being heard more faithfully to the original live musical event.
I also agree with others here that there are diminishing returns to ever higher sampling rates. At some point, increased sampling rates are inaudible. The only disagreement may be where that point occurs, and there is no scientific consensus on that.
Slowly but surely, music reproduction has improved, except for commercial blunders like deliberate dynamic compression. Don’t know what music genres you prefer, but the classical music I prefer has gotten really good in recordings from the past 20 years or so - better than ever - and the increasing trend toward hirez recording may be an important part of that, but there likely are other important factors.
Possibly small incremental improvements are still possible, but I believe we are already at the limit of how much improvement higher sampling rates and bit depth can give us. We have to look elsewhere for further improvement.
I have done so, and discrete hirez multichannel - actually quite a major improvement over stereo - is one such step. Unfortunately for many, it lends itself to and is primarily used for classical music. But, I have never been happier with music reproduction, and I have my doubts that it can become significantly better in sound quality, except for ever decreasing, ever smaller refinements.
I may be foolish to bet against the future like this and whatever it may bring. But, the laws governing mature technologies seem pervasive and inescapable. And, audio is definitely a mature technology, except in distribution and delivery.