When does it make sense to use a Case instead of going straight to an Incident?

I’m trying to better understand when an organization would choose the Case route versus going straight to an Incident.

In many DoD/internal support environments I’ve seen, the cleaner and quicker workflow is to open an Incident as soon as a customer calls or reports an issue. That gives the team one record to track the interaction, assignment, troubleshooting, and restoration work. If multiple users are experiencing the same issue, we then open a Problem for RCA and relate the Incidents back to it.

Because of that, I’m trying to understand where Cases really add value in practice.

For organizations using Case management / CSM, when do you decide a Case should be the primary intake record instead of an Incident? What makes that extra step worth it operationally? Is it mainly for customer/account context, entitlements, communication workflows, external customer support, or something else?

I’d be interested in hearing real-world examples of where Case + Incident worked better than just using the Incident-first route.