I built a moderately successful audio project around it. We've got a few hundred Pi's as audio player appliances for our streaming platform in a hospitality niche in my country.

Yeah, Pi audio card leaves a lot to be desired, but mostly the power level of the output. The signal quality can be worked around somewhat with processing the audio beforehand (standard compression and EQ stuff, so that the signal doesn't need something that the card can't do).

However, there are sound cards you can put on top of Pi, such as https://www.hifiberry.com (which we use), without breaking the budget, and they sound great.

Edit to add: what I love about Pis is how reliable they are. We literally treat them as appliances and they end up in places that are really not optimial from either ventilation, dust or temperature aspect, and they very rarely break. Even SD cards are not as fragile as we've initially feared (we've minimized write cycles but there is some of that).