I’m ready to admit my favorite tube preamps are a "coloration" (i.e. a pleasing distortion) added to the sound. But I really, truly prefer the resulting sound with them in the chain. If you want something that is a straight, transparent pass-through (i.e. "wire with gain"), then solid state or passive is the better way to go and I think there are many fine preamps which can get you there.
Back in the day of "just" analog sources, a preamp with some extra gain could be quite useful. Now we have digital sources that can push out 4 - 10 Volts from their XLR outputs, and your preamp is simply acting as a fancy attenuator (to be sure - attenuator quality matters!). You might as well look at something like a nice Khozmo passive, if you’re doing digital only (being careful to match impedance between source and amp, the goal being a 1:10 ratio on each side).
If you’re doing BOTH analog and digital sources, then you might have an awkward dance of optimizing for both of those with one preamp. Though these days, there are plenty of options for getting the analog source levels up on par with digital - e.g. using a SUT, or a high gain phono like Pass Labs or ARC Reference.