Blue Yeti on a USB-C iPad: does it just work?
Electrically yes: the iPad's port supplies 7.5 W and the microphone is class-compliant. What no app can change is the converter inside it — 16 bit, 48 kHz, and that decides how you should set the gain.
Short answer: yes, it works, and it needs no adapter beyond the right cable. The interesting part is not whether it connects but what it records.
The Yeti is a class-compliant USB device: iPadOS recognises it without drivers. It is bus-powered, and this database gives a USB-C iPad port 7.5 W — far more than a USB microphone draws, so no powered hub is required. Depending on which Yeti you have, the cable is USB-C to USB-C or Mini-USB to USB-C; a Lightning iPad needs Apple's camera adapter instead, and that is where powered hubs start to matter.
What you cannot change is what is inside. The Yeti carries its own preamp and its own converter, and that converter is 16 bit at 48 kHz. The gain knob on the back is analogue and sits in front of it.
The consequence almost no guide draws: an app set to 24 bit gets 16 bits of actual information padded into a 24-bit file. The extra bits come from the software, not from the microphone. Which makes the standard advice — "record conservatively at −18 dBFS and normalise later" — specifically wrong for this microphone. That advice exists because 24-bit interfaces have bits to spare; a 16-bit converter does not. Every 6 dB of unused headroom is one real bit discarded, and normalising afterwards amplifies the quantisation noise you created.
With a Yeti, set the analogue knob so that your loudest peaks land near −6 dBFS and watch them rather than trusting a target number. You lose the safety margin that −18 dBFS buys, so do a test take — but you keep the resolution, which you cannot get back later.