Don't forget some of your other options, such as piping across ssh commands, which is specifically very useful when piping tar output[1]. Piping tar commands traditionally was useful because it dealt better with some file types than scp did (devices, sockets, named pipes, tar is better overall at dealing with them, or was in the past). The other benefit is that after you realize you're just putting a sequence of commands into place to be run remotely, you start realizing you can do other things prior to the tar command if you need...

Rsync's ssh support is generally good, so might be about equivalent, but it's not always handy.

1: https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/howto-use-tar-command-through-...