There is no level of distortion that would be audible from any modern amplifier, of any design, not being deliberately overdriven. More the the point: there is

There is no level of distortion that would be audible from any modern amplifier, of any design, not being deliberately overdriven. More the the point: there is no distortion behavior of any amplifier anywhere that can't be modelled beyond the ability of ears to detect by a vanilla consumer DSP. Computers are too fast and too good to make this a meaningful argument. This is the flip side of guitar nut arguments: people swear that they have to use their analog pedals using, as you did, qualitative adjectives like "harsh". But all they really mean is that they have a specific sound out of their rig that they can't find an audio software engineer to acceptably model for them. And to be fair: that's a valid point! Software engineering is expensive. But it's got nothing to do with the capabilities or behavior of the hardware.