It’s fairly common to get external audio interfaces either for the number of inputs and outputs they can provide or for the interface types.

There are still some that also include DSPs which used to be extremely useful for taking some load off the system, but that a normally only helpful if those are being run on the inputs or you can do all the other parts of the mixing that follows that processing on the card itself.

It’s noticeable that those plugins are generally being ported to run on host CPUs these days because we are much less constrained than we use to be in that regard.

I bought one that's not only discrete, but external: I wanted S/PDIF output, and neither my laptop nor my dock had it. While we hit diminishing returns on output sound quality a long time ago, the occasional physical footprint advantage of a discrete part can be useful.

I think the PC internal ones are quite rare, but still there are some on the market. The USB ones are much more prevalent, I suspect because of laptops with broken sound cards. And I personally bought one because the headphones on the lappy would get interference otherwise.