Yeah it's true that people are still trying to make loud stuff. But as you say, people are so good at making it work now that's not really a "I'm making this -3

Yeah it's true that people are still trying to make loud stuff. But as you say, people are so good at making it work now that's not really a "I'm making this -3 because I need to be competitive with other songs," it's "I'm making this -3 because it's a heavy bass record and I want this to melt people's goddamn faces when they listen to it." In other words, an artistic decision, rather than a business one. I think most modern EDM-pop now is at about -7 or so. These are world-class engineers doing the mixing, they could absolutely push it to -5 or -3 if they wanted, there's just no need thanks to LUFS normalization. Like when people think about the real victims of the loudness war, it's albums like Californication or What's the Story (Morning Glory), which really didn't need to be that loud except for sounding better (in the louder = better sense) on the radio. Something like Death Magnetic you could argue is both intentionally loud + a victim of the loudness war, but it's also just really poorly mixed/mastered in general.