Comment by jorvi

The loudness wars were mostly an artifact of the 90s-2010s, because consumers were listening on horrible plasticky iPod earbuds or cheap Logitech speakers and the music had to sound good on those.

Once better monitors became more commonplace, mastering became dynamic again.

This is most clear with Metallica's Death Magnetic, which is a brickwalled monstrosity on the 2008 release but was fixed on the 2015 release[0]. And you can see this all over, where albums from the 90s had a 2000s "10-year anniversary" remaster that is heavily compressed, but then a 2010s or 2020s remaster that is dynamic again.

[0] Interestingly enough between those dates, fans extracted the non-brickwalled Guitar Hero tracks and mastered them as well as they could. Fun times :).