Granted, unit tests benefit less from soft assertions, but I'll take a shot at an example anyway:
Consider a complex object returned from a unit test result (this would be a single target state). That structure could have a missing field that should be reported, but the rest of the fields are evaluated fine, and so that information would be lost if the first assert halted the test.
For functional tests, the value is usually easier to discern, so for another contrived example:
A login form has a failed assert on it's UI structure, say a button is the wrong color, but the login is successful, and the following assertion post-login is also successful.
Ideally, you would assert post-login tests in separate target state, perhaps mocking the login as a pre-condition to another test. For functional tests that could dramatically increase the testing time and complexity, and so this makes a non-halting assertion valuable.