My personal view on the usage of renderer, streamer, and bridge…
In my time with digital audio the thing that plugged into network on one side and DAC on the other has taken many names. The term “renderer” was probably the most defined because the upnp/dlna standards use the word “renderer” to mean something specific in the standard. Early network devices were called renderer because they met this standard. Except, upnp/dlna turned out to be not so great for audio so it fell a bit out of favor and so did the term renderer.
The word “stream” is commonly referred to mean “from the Internet” and it’s only been very recently where the “from the Internet” audio streams were worth piping through your hifi. I assume, for this reason, using the word “streamer” a few years back for something that was targeted at hifi would make one hesitant. I, personally, would not have wanted to “stream” or use a “streamer” for Internet audio to my system even 6 years ago.
If a company was not building a renderer, something that conformed to or only conformed to the upnp/dlna standard, and they didn’t want their device to hold the low-bitrate / poor quality “stream” association what should they call it? And that’s where “bridge” came from. However, “bridge” means nothing in relation to what it does. What standard stuff should a bridge support? Where does it get its audio bits from? Again… ball of confusion.
Since we do have very good ways of pulling a stream from the Internet into our hifi then the term “streamer” makes a ton of sense today. We can be happy to put a streamer into our systems with very good results. Streamers are expected to stream all the normal hifi stuff including Tidal, Qobuz, Roon, etc. If a manufacturer wants to support more than the standard stuff great but the priority of these devices has moved from local (upnp/dlna type) to Internet streams. Call it a streamer.