Asymmetric keys mean you can you can have per-dev or per-team keys and allow one team to rotate them and resign them for all other consumers. I don't know how you'd do that with symmetric keys. This is an important feature of sops, imo.
It also means I can do things like seal them to a key that is stored in KeyVault and then allow the transparent retrieval of that key at runtime on Instances that have been given an identity with access.
This means that production secrets are sealed in place and only openable by effectively authenticated workloads.
And if you use sops-nix, this becomes a "setup once and never think about it ever again, ever" kind of operation.
It also means I can do things like seal them to a key that is stored in KeyVault and then allow the transparent retrieval of that key at runtime on Instances that have been given an identity with access.
This means that production secrets are sealed in place and only openable by effectively authenticated workloads.
And if you use sops-nix, this becomes a "setup once and never think about it ever again, ever" kind of operation.