The risk with either is the scale of the integration, as you point out with digital ID, into your private life and what control that would give to any authority that positions itself so that the credential has to be verified before you are given permission to use the service.
The automation is the trivial part. NFC chips, QR codes, barcodes of encrypted SSN that the authority can read/scan and decrypt and check against the database of the well behaved is all that is necessary.
SSN and any digital ID are identical in that there is a one to one relationship of unique individual to unique value that an authority can verify.
In this case they claim the digital ID will be required for employment verification. Which is already a usecase that SSN fills in the US among the others I highlighted.
