It’s possible their compression settings were actually exaggerating the peaks instead of compressing them, and then they did nothing to control those peaks afterwards. This is a really common thing that can happen with a superficial use of compressors. Especially if you did averaged loudness-matching of the compressed signal with the uncompressed signal. It ends up being spikier than before compression. I would entirely believe a waveform with those added spikes would be more damaging than a controlled waveform that had been saturated or limited after compression. I don’t have access to the original publication, so I can’t check and find out.
Or in short (as every modern producer already knows): Put a limiter on that!
Actually, put a limiter everywhere - if you work in software, they're real cheap..
Beyond any potential health effects, DRC also just sounds bad after listening for more than a few seconds. It kills the liveliness of the audio and the signal-to-noise ratio.
So why is it used? Loudness is like candy to your ears, we are drawn to it and people tend to perceive louder music as sounding better, even if it’s exactly the same except for a change to the volume knob. DRC+MG is a bit like turning up the volume knob on your behalf, except it’s worse in almost every way.
One legitimate use case for DRC+MG, and in fact one of the original justifications for its widespread use, was the rise of portable music, where you want to be able to hear all of the instruments even though you are in a loud environment like the subway, for example. But this devolved into the “Loudness Wars”.
Tasteful use of DRC, perhaps without much MG, can also help “glue” an instrument within an audio mix. I might use it on a bass guitar, for example, to keep its volume under control so it stays in the background, providing rhythm, and doesn’t accidentally become the lead.
Ideally, the base format for all audio would have little to no DRC, but there would be other versions or built-in metadata to help playback devices adjust the listening experience to the environment by enabling DRC when it makes sense to do so or if the user wants it. Just as movies can be watched with or without HDR and subtitles. Unfortunately, the audio world hasn’t progressed much in that direction.