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FLAC makes lots of smart decisions. One constraint on lossless audio should be that it's actually provably lossless (which the test suite confirms), and make it easy for the user to confirm the audio streams are the same as the decoded WAV file (`flac -t`) by storing a checksum of the stream.
I have often wondered why other media formats don't do a similar thing, especially since changing a media file's tags (which can change the checksum of a file) or name (which makes external verification from txt file difficult) is quite common. I even wrote a utility[0] that uses ffmpeg to hash the bitstreams and store the hashes in a xattr (yes, with lots of others options to test and compare, etc.), but all media formats should just be as clever (and care as much) to do this natively, like FLAC.
I mean -- why not?
[0]: https://github.com/kimono-koans/dano
In addition to what others have said (FLAC is lossless but compressed, and about 50% smaller than WAV), FLAC (plus a few other tiny files) is also the de facto format for archiving audio CDs (it can do other quality than CD quality, but it's mostly used to backup CDs).
When you rip one of your CD, a good ripper shall verify that your rip is 100% bit perfect (by verifying that the hash of your rip matches an online database of hashes of CDs ripped by other people). These rippers typically do rip to FLAC.
FWIW on Linux I've had good luck with "whipper" in the past (haven't ripped any CD that recently) [1]
[1] https://github.com/whipper-team/whipper