I have always subscribed to the notion "garbage in, garbage out", so I try to preserve as much of the information content from the source to final output.
This is a hangover from vinyl where if the turntable was rubbish or not properly set up then its performance would be the dominating factor.
Trouble is many people cannot get away from that and assume that the source of their dissatisfaction must be the digital front end. Even though they have speakers whose best use case would be for firewood. And often the listening room is almost empty of furnishings and highly reflective.
Then they see that their DAC gets measured here and comes in low down on the SINAD rank so they think a DAC with better SINAD is the answer. When of course it isn't they decide measurements are worthless and start looking at R-2R DACs, DACs with tubes, re-clockers, jitter-busters, isolation feet, expensive USB cables, grounding boxes and so on.
Ranking by SINAD isn't really helping it's adding to the confusion as this thread shows.