DRC compression, while far too frequent, is a far cry from MP3.
And it’s completely in the hands of the engineer who mastered the original source.
There remain some perfect masters. It’s not intrinsic to the CD format...unlike the MP3 format.
I have a copy of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony in which there are periods in the performance that one can barely, barely hear any sound at all. But in the end it’s ear-splitting.
There are also thousands of similar rock recordings available.
Compression is compression, and CDs are compressed and artists from the old days still have a tendency to complain about it. If you’re old enough to remember when CDs were new you’ll see the cyclical nature of life. All of your complaints about MP3s were logged 30 years ago about CDs and were just as valid, but CDs won, and now we think they’ve got the best sound. That’s why Neil Young got together with some nerds to create Pono, which uses FLAC. Of course even then FLAC is only as good as its source, if you FLAC from CD you get CD quality, if the artist FLACs from original source (ie the board mix that gets submitted to the manufacturer to get compressed into a CD) you get LP quality... or even better.