Off the top of my head, let's say the file you want to stream is Ogg Opus, but the device you're streaming to only supports FLAC and MP3. You could transcode to MP3 and get all the artifacts that come with a double lossy encode, or you could transcode to FLAC which doesn't buy you any bandwidth savings but it does avoid double lossy artifacts.

Chained Ogg FLAC works really well as an intermediary/internal streaming format.

In my case - I have an internet radio station available in a few different codec/bitrate combinations. I generate a chained Ogg FLAC stream so I have in-band metadata with lossless audio.

The stream gets piped into a process that will encode the lossy versions, update metadata the correct way per-stream (like there's HLS with timed ID3, there's Icecast with chained Ogg Opus, Icecast with AAC + Shoutcast-style metadata).