Actually no. Digital has given us tools to mangle sound in easier ways, and different storage media (vinyl did have physical limitations) but as Paul alluded to, this has roots in terrestrial radio. Specifically in New York in the 70s. Multiband compression, which was invented by a guy named Mike Dorrough, allowed stations to really compress the sound without pumping, which is an artifact of heavy compression. Without getting to in the weeds, different frequencies have different energies, low frequency carrying more, so dividing the frequency band into smaller slices you can compression them more even and achieve a higher average level.
So why this is important is people perceive louder as better, for a time, due to Fletcher Munson. Like Paul said, a band will come back and cry if their song isn't as loud as the next guy because they perceive it as worse. Also why commercials are so loud. other side of the coin is its ultimately fatiguing.
The real start of this is by a guy named Larry Berger who was a program director at a NY station back in the day. He was the first to apply multiband compression to broadcast radio because he knew being louder would get listeners. And it just spiraled from there. The RHCP album Californication is really recognized as album that went over the top, and Death Magnetic as the loudest ever.
As I said though in the second post of the thread people have backed off it quite a bit, it's been pretty well recognized as not good. Not that its great now by any stretch, but at least the problem has been recognized. I honestly wasn't 100% sure where ztejas was going with this, but I suspected the brickwall limiting may have been it, which is why I brought that up initially.