The major advantage of discrete op amps is the same as oxygen free copper. It's a money maker. As P.T.Barnum said, "There's a sucker born every minute". Then, there are plenty of people who think transistors have no place in amplifiers, and monolythic op-amps are chock full of transistors.
Op-amps are a feedback oriented way of thinking. That makes bandwidth and gain easier to work with compared to single stages all in a row. Still, you don't need to start with a differential pair to provide feedback. Where is the line between single stages with a feedback loop to the first emitter (or cathode) and an op-amp? If a feedback circuit is all that is required to form an op-amp, a Fender Princeton guitar amp is a discrete op-amp! If a differential pair is required to define an op-amp, Leo Fender didn't make those.
Personally, I know a guy who believes transistors have no purpose in audio amps. He actually has an amazing ear (he's a musician). I built an amp for him with 2 vacuum tubes, 4 monolythic op-amps and a discrete j-fet input stage. He installed that rack in his permanent setup. That was 15 years ago, he still plays through that amp, and he still doesn't know about the transistors.
Have you figured out what I think of, "buzzwords"?