Exactly what I do!
I build quite a bunch of Pi e.g for multiroom setups:
- some output directly via the jack (which is okay quality wise as long as you don't push the gain/stay at line level, the device downstream being the one doing amp)
- others have an iqaudio hat (either DAC for when the internal jack doesn't cut it or people want 24/192 or Amp+ to drive passive speakers)
And I didn't notice til recently but the Amp+ has onboard headers for balanced output, so with a bit of soldering one can add, say, XLR to the thing.
Then throw in some room eq via an impulse response and you get a device that rivals off the shelf stuff that cost one to two orders of magnitude more, plus you get to not throw away perfectly good hardware.
Similarly I've smartified a crapton of dumb+ devices with a bunch of Shelly stuff (notably Plug S are dead easy): washing machine, water heater, mechanical ventilation, light switches, thermostatic valves...
+ And in a few cases smart ones too, except I compared what I can do with the first party offering and my hackjob, and it's nuts that not only the first party shit is never local when technically it could totally be, but that my hacked-together BS is more useful than the first party option, on top of being 100% local.