The cable carries noise into the dac/stream. I haven’t tried Ethernet cables as much, though I imagine the better shielding and noise suppression the better the performance.That's why different USB and possibly Ethernet cables have different sound. These cables causes some type of noise downstream that affect the clocking of the DAC circuit. The better the cable, the less the noise will get through and get suppressed.
Ideally you have a DAC that gets clocked exactly at the same period with no jitter or noise. But the clock gets corrupted with noise from other sources such as USB/Ethernet. Even with asynchronous and local clocking, clock can still get corrupted.