Yeah, having an on-device DAC was really the killer feature for me. I'm fine using a lightning-to-3.5mm adapter but trying to be clever and putting the DAC in the adapter didn't work out super great for me since they seem to break super easily.
Right, I just mean that's it's not connected to the lightning port. Apple's lightning-3.5mm adapter conceals a small DAC inside compared to Google's approach on the older Pixels where USB-C just carried the analog signal which I think was a better, albeit more complicated, design.