My use is a niche case, but I will explain why USB will benefit me.
I have KEF LS60 wireless speakers but, internally, they do not have room compensation. For room correction I use a Raspberry Pi running CamillaDSP. I use a miniDSP Streamer kit as digital my I/O for my Raspberry Pi, and use a WiiM for streaming. My setup is:
WiiM --> miniDSP Streamer kit input --> Raspberry Pi --> miniDSP Streamer kit output --> LS60
The issue I run into is that, using the miniDSP Streamer kit as the digital input to the Raspberry Pi, CamillaDSP cannot recognize sample rate changes. E.g., If I set the WiiM to 192k, it works fine as long as Tidal is streaming the music at 192k. But, if the next song that comes up is recorded at 44.1k, Tidal will stream it at that rate, and the music comes out garbled, even if the WiiM still is set to 192k. The only thing that works is leaving the WiiM set to 44.1k.
There is a package, camilladsp-setrate, that will automatically configure CamillaDSP to use the detected sample rate. It does not work with the miniDSP Streamer kit because the miniDSP Streamer kit does not output a sample rate change notification needed by camilladsp-setrate to detect the sample rate change. Using a USB input, though, camilladsp-setrate is supposed to be able to detect the sample rate change. Thus, I am looking forward to outputting from a WiiM directly to the Raspberry Pi via USB, with a setup as follows:
WiiM --> Raspberry Pi --> miniDSP Streamer kit output --> LS60
Supposedly this will work to allow me to to set Tidal to stream at the highest available rate, and have CamillaDSP automatically change the sample rate on music that gets streamed at a lower sample rate.