Chris. Do you know why the MIDI IN & OUT connections stopped being provided on some keyboards and replaced with USB ?.
To add to previous answers (and this is going to be a long one): MIDI is a very old standard in terms of technology evolution. The MIDI standard was released in 1983 (almost 40 years ago!) and it was extremely futuristic (almost beyond state-of-the-art) at realease. But technology evolved since then...
The MIDI communication channel is a very slow one trasmitting data at 31250 bits per second (for those old enough to remember, that is telephone-modem speed!). With every byte occupying 10 bits in the transmission channel, and a NOTE-ON message in MIDI encompassing 3 bytes typically, this means no more than ~1000 notes per second can be transmitted (and note release counts as a separate note). Sounds like a lot, but really isn't when 16 channels are considered... and there is an additional problem: two separate notes must be at least 1ms (1 millisecond) apart, as they are transmitted sequentially. On fast passages with many chords this can become noticeable. And especially if a DAW is involved, which could easily send this and more (and I'm not even counting other messages, like pitch bend, modulation, filter control, and so on!)
When MIDI is transmitted over USB, the speed limitation is mitigated, as USB is a very fast protocol (up to 480Mbps on USB2), and we also can have multiple USB "ports" on the same cable.
The next step-up will be the newly released MIDI 2.0 standard. Amongst (many) other things, it increases the number of channels to 256 (up from 16), and adds lots of new functionality while remaining backwards compatible. But, to use all of the new functionality, the traditional "round connector" MIDI interface is no longer supported (*), and one of the favored interfaces is USB. The standard was released in 2020, and Yamaha is one of the developers, so I expect we will start to see a move towards this standard in the future. As this happens, traditional MIDI connectors will be dropped from products...
(*) Technically, it is supported with partial functionality, as MIDI 2.0 is backwards compatible.
If someone wants to read about MIDI 2.0, a couple of links:
Regards!