You're confusing the mixing stage with mastering. And yes everyone today masters very loud. Part of this is because Spotify which controls 80% of the market will put anything you upload through another limiter which brings everything up to some universal number of LUFS.

But at the same time I would argue that people don't want to go back to dynamic masters with very quiet parts. Outside of classical music, most people don't want more than like a 20 dB difference between the loudest and quiet elements. The ear tunes out high and low frequencies, as well as quiet parts of the song. You can't hear anything subtle on Spotify anyway because the bitrate is too low and most people are going through Bluetooth anyway which has a lossy compansion (compression/expander) algorithm.

If you want lossless audio with lots of dynamic range get a CD player and some headphones and mostly listen to classical. Imo hot masters are here to stay and there's nothing we can do about it.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5653720&forum_id=2).#48482330)