Likely the reason choice appears so confusing is both, from a L3 perspective, are almost identical. The big difference is whether you want multiple VLAN ports directly "attached" (same device) to your L3 interface.
When L3 switches came onto the market, when one only previously had routers and hubs/switches, one way to understand SVIs was to think of a L3 switch as a L2 VLAN capable switch and a router in the same physical device, which could implement all the usually L2/L3 topologies.
Consider, pre L3 switch topologies:
1) Router <p2p> Router
2) Gateway Router <> L2 domain
3) 2+ Routers <> L2 domain
How might you use L3 switches routed ports vs. SVIs?
For #1, you could use either, but usually routed ports would be used.
For #2, you would need a SVI.
For #3, whatever L3 switches are hosting the L2, they would use SVIs, but those not hosting the L2, are like #1, they could use either but would likely use routed.
The usual practice, when you must use a SVI, it's used, but if you can use either, a routed port is used.
Again, a routed port, as a choice, avoids using some low level traffic, but perhaps more importantly, it makes clear it's a usage case where a SVI is NOT required.
The last may not seem important, but when you get a phone call 3 AM, and need to dive into a part of a large network you've never seen before, any "hints" about network topology are useful.
In my prior reply, my proposal about a special usage case using a SVI rather than a routed port wasn't accepted as it was too confusing, and it was unlikely to be needed. Laugh, however, 4 months later, we had a very small branch down for over 6 hours because it took that long to get a network engineer on site when a site user could have just repatched the uplink if it had been a SVI. The field engineer that dealt with the event told me, I now really understand why you proposed this. (Of course, this still wasn't done because it was an unusual topology [true, most branches had dual uplinks] and it's a rare failure situation [also true].)
