I'm coming 'off the fence'

[f1eng]

USB and Ethernet have protocols to make sure the data is sent correctly.
...

Unfortunately for us "the data" that is sent correctly is designed for a machine to use and as you point out we're far from machines (or I could fix my computer with a placebo) so the data we hear can differ. The error correction helps computers receive the data sent, but we're still learning a lot about how to send sound digitally so that the human hearing the sound perceives the sound we're trying to transmit.

When the telephone was invented voice data was transmitted, but it took decades of research to learn how to transmit the right data in the right way to make what came out of the telephone sound like the human on the other end. Then we switched to digital, wireless, and our research hasn't caught up so the sound quality has suffered. We're transmitting more exact "data" now but it sounds far worse because we're paying more attention to the computer communications than the human perception.

Digital music is taking a similar path. When music went digital they promised "perfect sound forever". Whoops. It turns out that digitizing music certainly made it error-free from a computer data perspective, which is very useful when manipulating it but many people found that CDs sounded worse than vinyl. CD players improved, and now DACs are making rapid progress. The improvements aren't to the perfect transmission of bits but rather to other things that affect the sound we hear when those bits are transmitted. It turns out that the digital reconstruction filters are critical as is the control of noise even outside the audio band. All cables act as a filter to some degree. Let me assure you that we'd love to have made a perfect optical fiber but while we've made amazing stuff even optical transmission is imperfect. Those darn analog effects keep our digital data from being perfectly transmitted. Our imperfect understanding of what data needs to be transmitted in what ways keeps the sound from being perfect even if we could transmit the bits perfectly.

We keep improving the data transmission technology (Ethernet Cat 5, 5e, 6, 7, etc.) and one can easily build a robust data network now with ethernet, but that doesn't mean that we understand everything about digital music or making what comes through ethernet sound good. USB has even more technical issues with noise and other detractions from perfect transmission of music data. Luckily we're one our way to understanding them, and if you're interested then modern DAC design makes fascinating reading.

My experience differs.
I don't know owt about telephones though.

I have been making music recordings for over 50 years for enjoyment plus 40 years of data for work.
I have used recorders from monumentally expensive reel to reel recorders, inexpensive reel-to reel recorders, cassette decks from Aiwa and Nakamichi (I still use a CR7E), mono, valve, half track 1/4 track I still use a Revox B77), DAT and 3 sorts of non tape digital recorder in pcm and dsd.

This is what I know for a fact:
all the analogue methods produce a sound which differs from the microphone feed, audible if one does an on/off tape monitor, which the better recorders allow. If the machine is calibrated every 4 hours of use and the levels are very carefully set the differences are fairly small and, thankfully euphonic.
For data recording a recorder the size of a big suitcase produced good results but with a useable dynamic range of less than 60dB (I was recording noise and vibration on warships).
On the Formula 1 racing cars I worked on for 35 years none of the electric analogue data recordings methods worked well enough to get any useful data at all. The car was far too small for the good recorder and the small recorders were not good enough to get useful data.
In fact we did not get any really useful data until we recorded digitally, al lot of the technology consumers enjoy today would not have been produced if it were not for digital recorders.

Do not imagine "data" and "music" differ since music is air pressure fluctuation data so what goes for data recording goes identically for music.

In sound recording the only recorders I have used where the output of the recorder is completely indistinguishable (to me) from the microphone feed have been digital. And as long as levels are set carefully this has been true since my earliest use of digital recording FWIW.
Certainly some people early on who didn't understand made recordings without an anti-aliasing filter on the input. These will potentially contain audible errors (but I have never tried it since it seemed daft).

So, in summary, I realise that most music lovers have never made a recording and have therefore never had the opportunity to learn what I have.
I can assure people that, as long as the equipment is properly engineered, and some is not, listening to a digital recording allows one to hear as perfectly as possible what the recording engineer wanted you to hear.
That is not to say everybody will like his choice of mix/microphones/microphone location and so forth but I do not know anybody who has done plenty of recording who does not know this.

It is certainly the case that the euphonic distortions produced by analogue tape recorders, such as head saturation and the bass ripples sound nice. On the Metric Halo users discussion group it turned out that one of the most popular plugins recording engineers were using in their mix was one emulating tape saturation... (Then the output would not sound like the microphone feed but have been en-niceified )

So in my experience not only do digital recording methods produce a much more robust and accurate reproduction of the original microphone signal, but they have done so for decades.
I know that is not a popular fact in audiophile circles but it certainly is in all my years of experience.

I am as close to 100% sure as I can be that, short of eccentric engineering of DACs, the sound output of a digital recording system is what the recording/mixing engineer intended.
That is not to say that everybody will like that sound, and their room and speakers may well mean what they hear is nothing like he did on the studio monitors.

Thankfully there is plenty of opportunity to tune to ones taste the sound one gets at home using different DACs, amps, speakers and room, and even more ways if one uses a turntable.

Sorry, I know this is about USB cables but I felt impelled to correct some frequently repeated falsehoods about digital recording and replay based on my experience.
Frankly, anybody without recording experience has not had the experience to learn what I know, so erroneous speculation is unsurprising.