Currently E:earth_africa:dal does not check if the user passes a "real" file-system path or an URL when reading raster data using Band.from_rasterio() (same for the Band.read_pixels method). If, e.g., USE_STAC = True and a file-system path is passed, this raises an error not properly handled at the moment.
The idea would be to check for the status of the USE_STAC flag and check if the data type of the passed input dataset matches it.