Well, before it was just a lot more work to create an install image and keep it updated. So you'd just stick with the official Silverblue image, or the spins (KDE, Sway, etc).
And yeah, the advantage now is that you just pull from your image, and all the automations are run on the server beforehand. That means, if something breaks, you just don't upgrade because there's no new image, everything stays in sync across all your machines for free, and you don't have to use a bash/ansible/whatever script when you set up a new machine. Upgrades are also faster because all the layering has been done beforehand, thought that's not much of an issue if you have upgrades run in the background, which you should.